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Criminology research methods.

This section provides an overview of various research methods used in criminology and criminal justice. It covers a range of approaches from quantitative research methods such as crime classification systems, crime reports and statistics, citation and content analysis, crime mapping, and experimental criminology, to qualitative methods such as edge ethnography and fieldwork in criminology. Additionally, we explore two particular programs for monitoring drug abuse among arrestees, namely, the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) and Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM). Finally, the article highlights the importance of criminal justice program evaluation in shaping policy decisions. Overall, this overview demonstrates the significance of a multidisciplinary approach to criminology research, and the need to combine both qualitative and quantitative research methods to gain a comprehensive understanding of crime and its causes.

I. Introduction

• Brief overview of criminology research methods • Importance of understanding different research methods in criminology

II. Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) and Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM)

• Definition and purpose of DAWN and ADAM • Methodology and data collection process • Significance of DAWN and ADAM data in criminology research

III. Crime Classification Systems: NCVS, NIBRS, and UCR

• Overview and purpose of each system • Differences between the systems • Advantages and limitations of each system

IV. Crime Reports and Statistics

• Sources of crime data and statistics • Limitations of crime data and statistics • Use of crime data and statistics in criminology research

V. Citation and Content Analysis

• Definition and purpose of citation and content analysis • Methodology and data collection process • Applications of citation and content analysis in criminology research

VI. Crime Mapping

• Definition and purpose of crime mapping • Methodology and data collection process • Applications of crime mapping in criminology research

VII. Edge Ethnography

• Definition and purpose of edge ethnography • Methodology and data collection process • Applications of edge ethnography in criminology research

VIII. Experimental Criminology

• Definition and purpose of experimental criminology • Methodology and data collection process • Applications of experimental criminology in criminology research

IX. Fieldwork in Criminology

• Definition and purpose of fieldwork in criminology • Methodology and data collection process • Applications of fieldwork in criminology research

X. Criminal Justice Program Evaluation

• Definition and purpose of criminal justice program evaluation • Methodology and data collection process • Applications of criminal justice program evaluation in criminology research

XI. Quantitative Criminology

• Definition and purpose of quantitative criminology • Methodology and data collection process • Applications of quantitative criminology in criminology research

XII. Conclusion

• Importance of understanding different research methods in criminology • Future directions for criminology research methods

Criminology research methods are crucial for understanding the causes and patterns of crime, as well as developing effective strategies for prevention and intervention. There are various methods used in criminological research, each with its own strengths and limitations. Understanding the different research methods is essential for conducting high-quality research that can inform policies and practices aimed at reducing crime and promoting public safety. This overview provides an overview of some of the most commonly used criminology research methods, including the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) and Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM), crime classification systems such as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), crime reports and statistics, citation and content analysis, crime mapping, edge ethnography, experimental criminology, fieldwork in criminology, and quantitative criminology. The survey highlights the importance of understanding these methods and their applications in criminology research.

The Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) and Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) are two important research methods used in criminology to collect data on drug use and abuse among the population.

DAWN is a national public health surveillance system that tracks drug-related emergency department visits and deaths in the United States. The system collects data on drug-related medical emergencies and deaths from a variety of sources, including hospitals, medical examiners, and coroners. The purpose of DAWN is to provide information on drug use trends and the impact of drug use on public health and safety.

ADAM, on the other hand, is a research program that collects data on drug use and drug-related criminal activity among individuals who have been arrested and booked into jail. The program is designed to provide information on the prevalence of drug use and abuse among individuals involved in the criminal justice system.

Both DAWN and ADAM use similar methodology and data collection processes. Data is collected through interviews with individuals who have been involved in drug-related incidents, and through the analysis of drug-related data collected from medical and criminal justice records.

The significance of DAWN and ADAM data in criminology research is twofold. First, the data provides valuable information on drug use trends and patterns, which can inform the development of drug prevention and treatment programs. Second, the data can be used to understand the relationship between drug use and criminal behavior, and to inform criminal justice policies related to drug offenses.

Overall, the use of DAWN and ADAM in criminology research has contributed significantly to our understanding of drug use and abuse among the population, and has helped inform public health and criminal justice policies related to drug offenses.

The classification of crimes is an essential component of criminology research. The three main crime classification systems used in the United States are the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.

The NCVS is a victimization survey that collects data on the frequency and nature of crimes that are not reported to law enforcement. The survey is conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and includes a sample of households and individuals. The NCVS provides valuable insights into crime victimization patterns and trends.

The NIBRS, on the other hand, is a more detailed crime reporting system that provides a comprehensive view of crime incidents. It captures more data than the UCR, including information on the victim, offender, and the circumstances surrounding the crime. The NIBRS is being adopted by law enforcement agencies across the country and is expected to replace the UCR as the primary crime reporting system.

The UCR is the longest-running and most widely used crime reporting system in the United States. It collects data on seven index crimes, including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. The UCR provides an overview of crime trends and patterns at the national, state, and local levels.

Each system has its advantages and limitations. For example, the NCVS provides valuable information on crime victimization that is not captured by the UCR or NIBRS. The NIBRS provides more detailed information on crimes than the UCR but requires more resources to implement. The UCR is widely used and provides long-term trends but does not capture detailed information on each crime incident.

Understanding the differences and similarities between these classification systems is important for criminology research and policy development.

Crime reports and statistics are essential sources of data for criminology research. Law enforcement agencies, criminal justice systems, and government agencies collect and analyze crime data to develop policies and strategies to reduce crime rates. However, crime data and statistics have several limitations that researchers should consider when interpreting and using them in research.

One limitation of crime data and statistics is that they rely on the accuracy and completeness of reported crimes. Not all crimes are reported to law enforcement, and those that are reported may not be accurately recorded. Additionally, the police may have biases in their reporting practices, which can affect the accuracy of the data.

Another limitation of crime data and statistics is that they do not always provide a complete picture of crime. For example, crime data may not capture crimes that occur in private places or are committed by people who are not typically considered criminals, such as white-collar criminals.

Despite these limitations, crime data and statistics are still valuable sources of information for criminology research. They can help researchers identify patterns and trends in crime rates and understand the factors that contribute to criminal behavior. Crime data can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice policies and programs.

Researchers should be cautious when using crime data and statistics in their research and acknowledge the limitations of these sources. They should also consider using multiple sources of data to triangulate their findings and develop a more comprehensive understanding of crime trends and patterns.

Citation and content analysis are research methods that are increasingly used in criminology. Citation analysis involves the systematic examination of citations in published works to determine patterns of authorship, influence, and intellectual relationships within a given field. Content analysis, on the other hand, involves the systematic examination of written or visual material to identify patterns or themes in the content.

In criminology research, citation and content analysis can be used to study a wide range of topics, including the evolution of criminological theories, the impact of specific research studies, and the representation of crime and justice issues in the media. These methods can also be used to identify gaps in the literature and to develop new research questions.

The methodology for citation analysis involves gathering data on citations from published works, including books, articles, and other sources. This data is then analyzed to determine patterns in the citations, such as which works are cited most frequently and by whom. Content analysis involves the systematic examination of written or visual material, such as news articles or social media posts, to identify patterns or themes in the content. This process may involve coding the content based on specific categories or themes, or using machine learning algorithms to identify patterns in the data.

Citation and content analysis are important tools in criminology research because they provide a way to examine the influence of research and ideas over time, as well as the representation of crime and justice issues in the media. However, these methods also have limitations, such as the potential for bias in the selection of sources or the coding of content.

Overall, citation and content analysis are valuable research methods in criminology that can provide insights into the evolution of criminological theories, the impact of specific research studies, and the representation of crime and justice issues in the media.

Crime mapping is a criminology research method that visualizes the spatial distribution of crime incidents. Crime mapping involves the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other digital mapping tools to display crime data. The purpose of crime mapping is to provide researchers and law enforcement agencies with a better understanding of the spatial patterns of criminal activity in a given area.

Methodology and data collection process for crime mapping involve the collection of crime data and the use of GIS software to display the data in a visual format. Crime data can be collected from a variety of sources, such as police reports, victim surveys, and self-report surveys. Once the data is collected, it is geocoded, or assigned a geographic location, using a global positioning system (GPS) or address information.

The applications of crime mapping in criminology research are numerous. Crime mapping can be used to identify crime hotspots, or areas with a high concentration of criminal activity, which can help law enforcement agencies allocate resources more effectively. Crime mapping can also be used to identify crime patterns and trends over time, which can help researchers and law enforcement agencies develop strategies to prevent crime. Additionally, crime mapping can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of crime prevention and intervention strategies.

In conclusion, crime mapping is a valuable criminology research method that can provide researchers and law enforcement agencies with important insights into the spatial patterns of criminal activity. By using GIS and other digital mapping tools, crime mapping can help researchers and law enforcement agencies develop effective crime prevention and intervention strategies.

Edge ethnography is a criminology research method that focuses on studying the behaviors and social interactions of people on the fringes of society. It is often used to explore deviant or criminal behaviors in subcultures and marginalized groups. Edge ethnography involves immersive fieldwork, where the researcher actively participates in the activities of the group being studied to gain a deeper understanding of their values, beliefs, and practices.

The data collection process in edge ethnography involves participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. The researcher spends a considerable amount of time in the field to gain the trust and respect of the group members and to observe their behaviors and social interactions in a naturalistic setting. The researcher may also collect artifacts, such as photos and videos, to provide additional insights into the group’s activities.

Edge ethnography has many applications in criminology research. It can be used to explore the social and cultural contexts of criminal behaviors, as well as the experiences of marginalized groups in the criminal justice system. It can also be used to identify emerging trends and subcultures that may be associated with criminal activities.

However, edge ethnography also has limitations. It can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, requiring the researcher to spend a considerable amount of time in the field. It may also raise ethical concerns, particularly if the researcher is studying criminal activities or subcultures that engage in illegal behaviors. Therefore, it is important for researchers to carefully consider the ethical implications of their research and to take steps to protect the privacy and safety of their subjects.

Experimental criminology refers to the use of scientific experimentation to test theories related to crime and deviance. The goal is to isolate the effects of specific factors on criminal behavior by manipulating one variable while holding others constant. Experimental criminology can involve lab experiments, field experiments, and quasi-experiments.

The methodology involves randomly assigning participants to different groups, manipulating the independent variable, and measuring the dependent variable. The data collected can be both quantitative and qualitative.

Experimental criminology has been used to test a variety of theories related to crime, including deterrence theory, social learning theory, and strain theory. It has also been used to evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions, such as drug treatment programs and community policing initiatives.

Despite the potential benefits of experimental criminology, there are limitations to its use. For example, it can be difficult to generalize the findings of a lab experiment to real-world situations, and ethical concerns may arise when manipulating variables related to criminal behavior. However, experimental criminology remains a valuable tool in the criminology research arsenal.

Fieldwork is an integral part of criminology research that involves researchers immersing themselves in the settings they are studying to gather firsthand information about the social and cultural dynamics of the phenomenon being studied. Fieldwork in criminology can be conducted through various methods such as participant observation, ethnography, case studies, and interviews.

The purpose of fieldwork in criminology is to gain a deeper understanding of the social and cultural factors that contribute to criminal behavior, victimization, and the criminal justice system. Fieldwork also provides insights into the lived experiences of those involved in the criminal justice system and how they perceive and experience law enforcement, punishment, and rehabilitation.

The methodology and data collection process in fieldwork in criminology involve a range of activities, including developing research questions, selecting research sites, building relationships with research participants, conducting observations and interviews, collecting data, and analyzing data. Researchers may also use various tools such as field notes, audio and video recordings, photographs, and maps to document their observations and experiences.

Fieldwork in criminology has various applications, including exploring the social and cultural dynamics of crime and criminal justice, evaluating criminal justice programs and policies, and understanding the experiences of victims, offenders, and criminal justice professionals. Fieldwork is particularly useful in gaining insights into the perspectives and experiences of marginalized and vulnerable populations, such as those living in poverty, incarcerated individuals, and communities that experience high rates of crime.

Overall, fieldwork in criminology is a valuable research method that provides rich and detailed information about the social and cultural dynamics of crime, victimization, and the criminal justice system. It allows researchers to gain insights into the experiences and perspectives of those involved in the criminal justice system and provides opportunities to evaluate and improve criminal justice policies and programs.

Criminal justice program evaluation refers to the systematic assessment of programs and policies implemented within the criminal justice system to determine their effectiveness in achieving their intended goals. The evaluation process involves collecting and analyzing data to assess the program’s impact, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. Program evaluation is an essential tool for policymakers and practitioners to make informed decisions about criminal justice policies and programs.

The methodology used in program evaluation varies depending on the program or policy being evaluated. However, the process typically involves identifying the program’s goals and objectives, determining the program’s theory of change, identifying the target population, developing measures to evaluate the program, collecting and analyzing data, and reporting the findings.

Criminal justice program evaluation can be used to assess a wide range of programs, including correctional programs, law enforcement initiatives, and community-based programs. Evaluation findings can be used to determine the effectiveness of the program in reducing recidivism, improving public safety, or achieving other goals.

In recent years, criminal justice program evaluation has gained increasing attention as policymakers and practitioners seek evidence-based solutions to address the challenges facing the criminal justice system. The use of program evaluation has been instrumental in identifying effective interventions and programs, as well as those that are ineffective or even counterproductive.

Overall, criminal justice program evaluation is a critical tool for improving the effectiveness of criminal justice policies and programs. By providing policymakers and practitioners with evidence-based information, program evaluation can help to ensure that resources are used efficiently and effectively to promote public safety and reduce crime.

Quantitative criminology is a research method that involves the use of statistical data and techniques to analyze and understand crime patterns and behavior. It focuses on measuring and analyzing crime trends and patterns, identifying risk factors, and evaluating the effectiveness of crime prevention and intervention programs.

Quantitative criminology involves the use of numerical data to understand crime and its correlates. The purpose of this research method is to test theories and hypotheses about the causes and consequences of crime, identify patterns and trends, and evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice policies and programs.

Quantitative criminology uses a variety of research methods and data collection techniques, including surveys, experiments, observations, and secondary data analysis. Researchers use statistical analysis to identify patterns, trends, and relationships among variables, such as crime rates, demographic characteristics, and socioeconomic factors.

Quantitative criminology has been used to study a wide range of topics, including the relationship between crime and social inequality, the effectiveness of community policing programs, and the impact of incarceration on recidivism. It has also been used to develop and test theories of crime, such as social disorganization theory and strain theory.

Quantitative criminology has contributed significantly to our understanding of crime and criminal behavior. It has provided valuable insights into the causes and consequences of crime and helped to inform the development of effective crime prevention and intervention programs.

The study of criminology is a complex field that requires a variety of research methods to understand and analyze the causes and patterns of crime. This article has provided an overview of several important criminology research methods, including the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) and Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM), crime classification systems such as NCVS, NIBRS, and UCR, crime reports and statistics, citation and content analysis, crime mapping, edge ethnography, experimental criminology, fieldwork, and criminal justice program evaluation. Each research method has its unique strengths and limitations, making it important for criminologists to choose the appropriate method for their research question.

As the field of criminology continues to evolve, it is important for researchers to consider new and innovative research methods. Future directions in criminology research may include advances in technology, such as the use of big data analytics and machine learning algorithms, as well as an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborations between criminologists and experts in fields such as psychology, sociology, and public health.

Overall, the study of criminology requires a diverse range of research methods to fully understand the complex nature of crime and its causes. By utilizing these methods and continuing to explore new avenues for research, criminologists can make important contributions to our understanding of crime and help inform policies and interventions aimed at reducing crime and promoting public safety.

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• Open access
• Published: 12 August 2014

Innovative data collection methods in criminological research: editorial introduction

• Jean-Louis van Gelder 1 &
• Stijn Van Daele 2  

Crime Science volume  3 , Article number:  6 ( 2014 ) Cite this article

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Novel technologies, such as GPS, the Internet and virtual environments are not only rapidly becoming an increasingly influential part of our daily lives, they also have tremendous potential for improving our understanding of where, when and why crime occurs. In addition to these technologies, several innovative research methods, such as neuropsychological measurements and time-space budgets, have emerged in recent years. While often highly accessible and relevant for crime research, these technologies and methods are currently underutilized by criminologists who still tend to rely on traditional data-collection methods, such as systematic observation and surveys.

The contributions in this special issue of Crime Science explore the potential of several innovative research methods and novel technologies for crime research to acquaint criminologists with these methods so that they can apply them in their own research. Each contribution deals with a specific technology or method, gives an overview and reviews the relevant literature. In addition, each article provides useful suggestions about new ways in which the technology or method can be applied in future research. The technologies describe software and hardware that is widely available to the consumer (e.g. GPS technology) and that sometimes can even be used free of charge (e.g., Google Street View). We hope this special issue, which has its origins in a recent initiative of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) called CRIME Lab, and a collaborative workshop together with the Research consortium Crime, Criminology and Criminal Policy of Ghent University, will inspire researchers to start using innovative methods and novel technologies in their own research.

Issues and challenges facing crime researchers

Applied methods of scientific research depend on a variety of factors that play out at least in part beyond researcher control. One such factor regards the nature and availability of data, which largely determines the research questions that can be addressed: Data that cannot be collected cannot serve to answer a research question. Although this may seem like stating the obvious, it has had and continues to have far-reaching implications for criminological research. Because crime tends to be a covert activity and offenders have every interest in keeping it that way, crime in action can rarely be observed, let alone in such a way as to allow for systematic empirical study. Consequently, our knowledge of the actual offending process is still limited and relies in large part on indirect evidence. The same applies to offender motivations and the offending process; these cannot be measured directly in ways similar to how we can observe say the development of a chemical process or the workings of gravity. This has placed significant restrictions on the way crime research has been performed over the years, and most likely has coloured our view of crime and criminality by directing our gaze towards certain more visible elements such as offender backgrounds, demographics and criminal careers.

Another factor operating outside of researcher control regards the fact that the success of scientific analyses hinges on the technical possibilities to perform them. Even if researchers have access to particular data, this does not guarantee that the technology to perform the analysis in the best possible way is available to them. The complexity of the social sciences and the interconnectivity of various social phenomena, together with the lack of a controlled environment or laboratory, require substantial computational power to test highly complicated models. For instance, the use of space-time budgets, social network analysis or agent-based modelling can be quite resource-intensive. Adding the complexity of social reality to the resulting datasets (e.g. background variables related to social structure, GIS to incorporate actual road networks, etc.) puts high pressure on the available computational power of regular contemporary desktop computers. Addressing these challenges has practical and financial consequences, which brings us to the third issue, which although more mundane in nature is by no means limited to the applied sciences: a researcher requires the financial and non-financial resources to be able to perform his research.

All three factors have a bearing on the contents and goals of the present special issue. More specifically, the methods that are discussed and explained in different articles in this special issue each address one or more of these factors and have, we believe, the potential to radically change the way we think about crime and go about doing crime research. The methods and technologies are available, feasible and affordable. They are, so to speak, there for the taking.

Notes on criminological research methods

The above factors have contributed to a general tendency within criminology to stick to particular research traditions, both in terms of method and analysis. Although these traditions are well-developed and have undergone substantial improvement over the decades, most changes in the way research is performed in the discipline have been of the ’more of the same‘ variety, and most involve gradual improvements, rather than embodying ‘scientific revolutions’ and ‘paradigm shifts’ that have radically changed how criminologists go about doing research and thinking about crime.

With respect to methodology, since the field's genesis in the early 20th century, research in criminology has largely spawned studies using similar methods. In a meta-analysis of articles that have appeared in seven leading criminology and criminal justice journals in 2001-2002, Kleck et al. ([ 2006 ]) demonstrate that survey research is still the dominant method of collecting information (45.1%), followed by the use of archival data (31.8%), and official statistics (25.6%). Other methods, such as interviews, ethnographies and systematic observation, each account for less than 10% (as methods are sometimes combined the percentages add up to more than 100%). Furthermore, the Kleck et al. meta-analysis shows that as far as data analysis is concerned, nearly three quarters (72.5%) of the articles published uses some type of multivariate statistics. As such, it appears that criminology has developed a research tradition that started to dominate the field, though not to everybody's enthusiasm. Berk ([ 2010 ]), for example, states that regression analysis, in its broad conception, has become so dominant that researchers give it more credit than they sometimes should and take some of its possibilities for granted. Whereas certain research traditions may have a strong added value, they run the risk of being used more out of habit than for being the most appropriate method to answer a particular research question. As innovation influences our daily lives and how we perform our daily activities, there is no reason why it should not influence our way of performing science as well.

Innovation and technology in daily life and their application in criminological research

Novel technologies, such as GPS, the Internet, and virtual environments are rapidly establishing themselves as ingrained elements of our daily lives. Think, for example, of smart phones. While unknown to most of us as recently as ten years ago, today few people would leave their home without carrying one with them. Through their ability to, for example, transmit visual and written communication, use social media, locate ourselves and others through apps and GPS, smart phone technology has radically changed the way we go about our daily routines. The research potential of smart phone technology for improving our understanding of social phenomena is enormous and includes a better understanding of where, when and why crime occurs through automated data collection, interactive tests and surveys (Miller [ 2012 ]). Yet, so far surprisingly few crime researchers have picked up on the possibilities this technology has to offer.

A similar point can be made with respect to the Internet. While most researchers have made the transition from paper-and-pencil questionnaires to online surveys and online research panels may have become the norm for collecting community sample data, much of the potential of the Internet for crime research remains untapped. Think, for example, of the possibility of using Google Maps and Google Street View for studying spatial aspects of crime and the ease with which we can virtually travel down most of the roads and streets to examine street corners, buildings and neighbourhoods. The launch of Google Street View in Belgium stirred up controversy because it was perceived by police officers as a catalogue for burglars and was expected to lead to an increase in the number of burglaries. While it is not clear whether this has actually happened, crime studies reporting these tools in their method sections are few and far between.

In addition to novel technologies, several innovative research methods, such as social network analysis, time-space budgets, and neuropsychological measures that can tap into people's physiological and mental state, have emerged in recent years and have become common elements of the tool-set used in some of criminology's sister disciplines, such as sociology, psychology and neuroscience. Again, while often highly accessible and relevant for crime research, these methods are currently underutilized by crime researchers. The promising and emerging field of neurocriminology is an important exception in this respect (see e.g., Glenn & Raine [ 2014 ]).

To revert back to the three issues that have restricted the gaze of criminology mentioned at the outset of this article: accessibility of data, type of data analysis, and availability of resources, the new methods and technologies seem to check all the boxes. Much more data have become accessible for analysis through novel technologies, new methods for data-analysis and data-collection have been developed, and most of it is available at the consumer level. In other words, this allows for collecting and examining data in ways that go far beyond what we are used to in crime research. For example, methods combining neurobiological measurements with virtual environments can tell us a lot about an individual's mental and physical states and how they go about making criminal decisions, which were until recently largely black boxes. Finally, novel technologies are often available on the consumer market, such as smart phones, tablets, and digital cameras, and require only very modest research budgets. In some cases, such as the automated analysis of footage made by security cameras, simulations, or the use of honeypots that lure cyber criminals into hacking them, they even allow for systematically examining crime in action.

Goals of this special issue of Crime Science

The principal aim of the present special issue is to acquaint crime researchers and criminology students with some of these technologies and methods and explain how they can be used in crime research. While widely diverging, what these technologies and methods have in common is their accessibility and potential for furthering our understanding of crime and criminal behavior. The idea, in other words, is to explore the potential of innovative research methods of data-collection and novel technologies for crime research and to acquaint readers with these methods so that they can apply them in their own research.

Each article deals with a specific technology or method and is set-up in such a way as to give readers an overview of the specific technology/method at hand, i.e., what it is about, why to use it and how to do so, and a discussion of relevant literature on the topic. Furthermore, when relevant, articles contain technical information regarding the tools that are currently available and how they can be obtained. Case studies also feature in each article, giving readers a clearer picture of what is at stake. Finally, we have encouraged all contributors to give their views on possible future developments with the specific technology or method they describe and to make a prediction regarding the direction their field could or should develop. We sincerely hope this will inspire readers to apply these methods in their own work.

While not intended as a manual, after reading an article, readers should not only have a clear view of what the method/technology entails but also of how to use it, possibly in combination with one or more of the references that are provided in the annotated bibliography provided at the end of each article. The contributions may also be useful for researchers already working with a specific method or students interested in research methodology.

Article overview

Hoeben, Bernasco and Pauwels discuss the space-time budget method. This method aims at retrospectively recording on an hour-by-hour basis the whereabouts and activities of respondents, including crime and victimization. The method offers a number of advantages over existing methods for data-collection on crime and victimization such as the possibility of studying situational causes of crime or victimization, possibly in combination with individual lifestyles, routine activities and similar theoretical concepts. Furthermore, the space-time budget method offers the possibility of collecting information on spatial location, which enables the study of a respondent's whereabouts, going beyond the traditional focus of ecological criminological studies on residential neighborhoods. Finally, the collected spatial information on the location of individuals can be combined with data on neighborhood characteristics from other sources, which enables the empirical testing of a variety of ecological criminological theories.

The contribution of Gerritsen focuses on the possibilities offered by agent-based modeling, a technique borrowed from the domain of Artificial Intelligence. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a computational method that enables a researcher to create, analyse and experiment with models composed of agents that interact within a computational environment. Gerritsen explains how modeling and simulation techniques may help gain more insight into (informal) criminological theories without having to experiment with these phenomena in the real world. For example, to study the effect of bystander presence on norm violation, an ‘artificial neighborhood’ can be developed that is inhabited by 'virtual aggressors and victims’, and by manipulating the agents’ parameters different hypothetical scenarios may be explored. This enables criminologists to investigate complex processes in a relatively fast and cheap manner.

Since the pioneering early studies of the 1990s hinted at its promise as a method for social scientific research, Virtual Reality (VR) technology is increasingly used as a research tool by social scientists from various disciplines such as psychology and sociology. Given recent developments that have greatly enhanced the realism, reduced costs, and increased possibilities for application, it seems well on its way to become an established method in the social sciences. In their contribution Van Gelder, Luciano and Otte explore the potential of VR as a tool for research in criminology. Their article offers a description of how virtual reality has been used in social scientific research before discussing the potential it holds for criminology. By way of illustration, the authors describe a recent case study that has used immersive virtual reality for theory testing, which gives an idea of the unique possibilities of VR for studying crime.

Cornet also draws from criminology's sister disciplines in her article on neurobiological measurements observing that while the literature on the relationship between neurobiological factors and antisocial behavior has accumulated in recent years, the use of neurobiological measurements does not yet play a central role in criminological research. One of the underlying reasons Cornet identifies is the idea among criminologists that it is complicated to use these techniques compared to sociological, psychological and behavioral instruments. This article aims to provide an overview of the most commonly used neurobiological measurements, their added value and, importantly, how they can be relatively easily implemented in criminological research.

Vandeviver explains the possibilities and merits of online mapping applications such as Google Maps and Google Street View. While these technologies have evoked concern from law enforcement agencies that offenders could exploit them, Vandeviver notes that for criminologists they also open up several new perspectives to conduct research. Elaborating on results from prior studies in related fields and personal research experience, three potential uses of Google Maps and Google Street View in criminological research are explored and discussed. In particular, this article deals with how these online mapping applications can generate new research questions, how they allow revisiting and re-assessing established theories in criminology and common research practices, and how they should be considered an essential part of the methodological toolkit of criminologists.

Lemieux, also taking a spatial approach, describes how digital cameras with integrated GPS units can be used to collect useful data for criminological purposes observing that while visual observations have traditionally been an important method of criminological research, when combined with spatial data, such observations become a particularly useful way to describe how crime and disorder are distributed. Lemieux describes the utility and ease of using geo-tagged photographs and GPS tracks for monitoring illegal activity in urban and rural settings presenting case studies from Uganda and Amsterdam.

Vander Laenen discusses a method of qualitative criminological research, the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), which is not necessarily innovative by and of itself, but which has hardly been applied in criminology. The NGT is a highly structured technique with characteristics of an individual survey and a focus group. However its structure limits the influence of the researcher and of group dynamics and guarantees equal participation to all group members and equal influence of (conflicting) values and ideas. The NGT forms an ideal technique for gathering and prioritizing ideas and for innovative solution planning. Furthermore, despite the structure of the procedure, the technique can be modified and easily be applied in a mixed-methods research design. By means of an example, Vande Laenen reports on the use of the NGT in a study on the needs assessment of drug (prevention) policy.

In the final contribution to this special issue on innovative methods of data collection in criminology, De Bondt suggests solutions for doing cross-border criminal policy research and the confusion in wording and interpretation that emerge when comparing different legal systems. Correctly interpreting foreign information and using it as a valid source to substantiate analyses on where, when and why crime occurs and/or how to improve the fight against crime, often requires the expertise of people that are very familiar with a certain legal system. Based on a literature review and a number of successful experiences with the method in past research projects, the strengths and weaknesses of working with (predominantly) multiple choice based questionnaires sent to a single point of contact in each of the EU member states is elaborated upon.

Authors' contributions

Both Jean-Louis van Gelder and Stijn van Daele contributed to all aspects of the paper. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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van Gelder, JL., Van Daele, S. Innovative data collection methods in criminological research: editorial introduction. Crime Sci 3 , 6 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-014-0006-1

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Methods of Criminology and Criminal Justice Research: Volume 24

Table of contents

Introduction: measuring crime and criminal justice, part i: general patterns and trends, is crime rising or falling a comparison of police-recorded crime and victimization surveys.

Purpose – Statistics about the level of crime continue to attract public and political attention but are often presented in conflicting ways. In England and Wales, police-recorded crimes are no longer considered “national statistics” and, instead, the crime survey of England and Wales (CSEW) is used. However, it is not clear why partial population data (e.g., police-recorded crime) are considered less reliable or valid for measuring temporal crime trends in society than inferential statistical estimation models that are based on samples such as CSEW. This is particularly the case for approximating rare events like high-harm violence and specific harmful modus operandi (e.g., knife crime and firearms). In this chapter, the authors cross-reference victim survey and police-recorded data to determine similarities and contradictions in trends.

Methods – Using police data and CSEW estimates, the authors contrast variance and logarithmic trend lines since 1981 across a range of data categories and then triangulate the results with assault records from hospital consultations.

Findings – Change in crime rates in recent years is neither as unique nor extreme as promulgated in media coverage of crime. Moreover, analyses show conflicting narratives with a host of plausible but inconclusive depictions of the “actual” amount of crime committed in the society. The authors also conclude that neither source of data can serve as the benchmark of the other. Thus, both data systems suffer from major methodological perils, and the estimated crime means in CSEW, inferred from samples, are not necessarily more valid or accurate than police-recorded data (particularly for low-frequency and high-harm crimes). On the other hand police-recorded data are susceptible to variations in recording practices. As such, the authors propose a number of areas for further research, and a revised taxonomy of crime classifications to assist with future public interpretations of crime statistics.

Originality – There is much public and academic discourse about different sources of crime measurement yet infrequent analysis of the precise similarities and differences between the methods. This chapter offers a new perspective on long-term trends and highlights an issue of much contemporaneous concern: rising violent crime.

Using Freedom of Information Requests in Socio-Legal Studies, Criminal Justice Studies, and Criminology

Purpose – The chapter explores the use of freedom of information (ATI/FOI) requests in social science research, with specific focus on using ATI/FOI requests in socio-legal studies, criminal justice studies, and criminology.

Methodology/approach – ATI/FOI requests constitute a novel method of data collection that has methodological and also epistemological implications for researchers.

Findings – The chapter explains how to use ATI/FOI requests in social science as well as how to navigate challenges and barriers ATI/FOI users regularly face.

Originality/value – There is a paucity of writings on use of ATI/FOI requests in socio-legal studies, criminal justice studies, and criminology. The chapter reveals the value of using ATI/FOI in social science and the originality of the data that ATI/FOI requests can result in.

Criminal Group Dynamics and Network Methods

Purpose – Criminal groups have long been central to explanations of crime and deviance. Yet, challenges in measuring their dynamic and transient nature meant that group-level explanations were often displaced in favor of individual-level ones. This chapter outlines how network methods provide a powerful tool for modeling the dynamic nature of criminal groups.

Approach – The chapter starts by providing a brief introduction to social network analysis, including key concepts and terminology. The chapter then focuses on the types of relational data available to study criminal groups, and how network methods can be used to delineate group boundaries. The chapter concludes by presenting a framework for understanding group dynamics from a network perspective, describing the contributions of network analysis to theories of group processes.

Findings – Network methods have provided meaningful advances to the study of group dynamics, leading scholars to revisit assumptions about the impact of group’ structure on delinquent behavior. Network studies of group dynamics have primarily focused on the cohesion–delinquency link (within-group structure) and the social contagion of conflict (between-group structure), highlighting important opportunities for the intersection of these two inquiries.

Value – Network methods provide a means to revisit and extend theories of crime and delinquency with a focus on social structure. The unique affinity between group dynamics and network methods highlights immense opportunities for expanding the knowledge of collective trajectories.

Part II: Special Groups and Problems

Innovative methods of gathering survey data on violence against women.

Purpose – This chapter presents some innovative ways in which researchers can collect survey data on various types of violence against women.

Methodology/approach – The suggestions made here are drawn from over 30 years of national, international, and local survey research.

Findings – The methods described in this chapter minimize underreporting, produce theoretically relevant data, and have meaningful policy consequences.

Originality/value – The research techniques reviewed here have made many important contributions to the field and the data they uncovered have helped raise public awareness about one of the world’s most compelling social problems.

Methods of Male Sex Work Research: Recommendations and Future Research Opportunities

Purpose – Exploration of the methodological aspects of male sex work is rather limited. Without a strong methodological toolkit to draw from, research in male sex work will not be able to accurately capture changes in the dynamic sex work environment. Thus, the author provides a comprehensive review of methods in male sex work along with a broad spectrum of methodological insights through which future research can be advanced.

Methodology/approach – Drawing from two studies that the author conducted in the male independent escorting space, this chapter provides a range of methodological insights and offers avenues for future research.

Findings – This chapter reviews the methods used in male sex work research over the years and details the lack of research on methodological inquiry in the field.

Originality/value – With the increasing normalization and dynamism of male sex work, it is necessary for the research to provide methodological guidance for the next wave of studies in the field. The recommendations and research directions proposed herein are hoped to have implications for research in the larger sex work context.

Employing Mixed Methods: The Case of Elder Financial Exploitation

Purpose – This chapter will demonstrate the usefulness of mixed methods research in an understudied area of criminology and criminal justice, namely elder financial exploitation.

Methodology/approach – The data and research methodology described in this chapter come from a recently completed comprehensive case study of elder financial exploitation in Florida.

Findings – Elder financial exploitation is a growing social problem in the United States and there is little theoretical or empirical research available regarding the prevalence, risk factors, protective factors, and consequences. Given that the current status of the research literature is largely fragmented and discontinuous, conducting a survey aimed at validation was not possible. Through the mixed method case study involving a literature review, focus group discussions, and interview questions, the authors have developed a theoretical framework for elder financial exploitation that can be quantitatively validated.

Originality/value – This chapter provides justification for the expanded use of mixed methods research for other understudied topic areas within criminology and criminal justice and provides the foundation for the development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for explaining elder financial exploitation.

Perceptions of School Safety in the Aftermath of a Shooting: Challenge to Internal Validity?

Purpose – In the midst of the second wave of data collection for a Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) research project, a mass shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This tragic incident provoked responses across the United States, including intense political discourse, organized student protests, and active shooter drills. In order to assess the potential influence of a major threat to school safety on the perceptions of adolescents, this chapter analyzes the survey responses of middle and high school students in St. Louis County.

Methodology/approach – Approximately one-third of the sample was surveyed prior to the shooting and the remaining students completed surveys within three months after the shooting. The authors examines the potential influence of the shooting on students’ reports on a number of school safety issues, including fear and perceived risk of victimization, likelihood of reporting guns on campus, and engaging in avoidance behaviors.

Findings – Results indicate that the shooting significantly influenced students’ perceptions of school disorder and likelihood of reporting a weapon at school, especially in white, less disadvantaged schools. The results also reflect meaningful effects based on the timing of data collection post-shooting, with many of the significant changes appearing within three weeks after February 14, 2018.

Originality/value – This study explores how external events may influence student perceptions of school safety. Moreover, this study offers a methodological contribution by demonstrating an assessment of the Parkland shooting as a potential threat to internal validity.

Part III: Crossing Boundaries

Methodological challenges in collaborative research with immigrant women experiencing intimate partner violence in canada.

Purpose – The chapter explores the methodological challenges in doing community-based participatory research (CBPR) in social science investigations with immigrant women experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) in Canada.

Methodology/approach – The methodological comments, observations, and challenges discussed in this chapter result from research funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council, a branch of the Canadian Federal Tri-Council. The research that the authors conducted was both quantitative and qualitative in nature. The sample consisted of three groups of women: (1) immigrant women in Canada >10 years, (2) immigrant women in Canada <10 years, and (3) visible minority women born in Canada.

Findings – The chapter highlights some of the lessons learned in conducting CBPR research in the context of immigrant survivors of IPV. This discussion can be relevant to both academics and non-profit/advocacy agencies interested in pursuing community partnership research on interpersonal violence.

Originality/value – There is a paucity of writings on CBPR research in the social science and the challenges. This chapter reveals the methodological challenges that the researchers experienced in doing CBPR with racialized immigrant women who are survivors of IPV. This discussion can be relevant to both academics and non-profit/advocacy agencies interested in pursuing community partnership research on interpersonal violence.

The Uses and Limits of Photovoice in Research on Life After Immigration Detention and Deportation

Purpose – This chapter critically reflects on the author’s failed attempt to incorporate visual methods in follow-up research on immigration detention and deportation in Britain. In particular, it considers the uses and limits of participant-generated visuals, and the specific method of photovoice, which were originally conceived as a means to explore themes of home, identity, and belonging in and through practices of detention and release or expulsion.

Methodology/approach – This chapter discusses the visual method of photovoice to consider the uses and limits of participant-generated visuals.

Findings – Drawing on the notion of research “failure,” this chapter highlights the challenges and limitations of photovoice in follow-up research with individuals who were detained and/or deported, pointing to various methodological, logistical, ethical, and political issues pertaining to the method itself and the use of the visual in criminological research.

Originality/value – Criminologists are increasingly considering the visual and the power of photographic images within criminological research, both as objects of study and through the use of visual methodologies. This shift toward the examination, as well as integration, of images raises a number of important methodological, ethical, and political questions worthy of consideration, including instances where visual methods like photovoice are unsuccessful in a research project.

Agency Records as a Method for Examining Human Trafficking

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to examine the ways in which human trafficking has been measured through the use of agency record data.

Approach – The authors review the state of previous research on human trafficking using agency record data and the challenges that are important to consider when using agency records in the study of human trafficking.

Findings – Researchers have used agency records in a wide variety of ways to measure human trafficking victimization, perpetration, and patterns or case characteristics. Agency data provide unique contributions to understand human trafficking including the scope of the problem, predictors of victimization, and public perceptions of this crime. The authors describe the efforts to use agency records to estimate the prevalence of human trafficking in a statewide study.

Value – This chapter provides an overview of how agency records have been used in human trafficking research in recent years. Furthermore, this chapter includes a case study and methodological reflection on the use of agency records in a statewide human trafficking prevalence study. The authors conclude with a methodological reflection and considerations moving forward for future use of agency data in human trafficking research.

Searching for Extremist Content Online Using the Dark Crawler and Sentiment Analysis

Purpose – This chapter examines how sentiment analysis and web-crawling technology can be used to conduct large-scale data analyses of extremist content online.

Methods/approach – The authors describe a customized web-crawler that was developed for the purpose of collecting, classifying, and interpreting extremist content online and on a large scale, followed by an overview of a relatively novel machine learning tool, sentiment analysis, which has sparked the interest of some researchers in the field of terrorism and extremism studies. The authors conclude with a discussion of what they believe is the future applicability of sentiment analysis within the online political violence research domain.

Findings – In order to gain a broader understanding of online extremism, or to improve the means by which researchers and practitioners “search for a needle in a haystack,” the authors recommend that social scientists continue to collaborate with computer scientists, combining sentiment analysis software with other classification tools and research methods, as well as validate sentiment analysis programs and adapt sentiment analysis software to new and evolving radical online spaces.

Originality/value – This chapter provides researchers and practitioners who are faced with new challenges in detecting extremist content online with insights regarding the applicability of a specific set of machine learning techniques and research methods to conduct large-scale data analyses in the field of terrorism and extremism studies.

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4 Chapter 4: Survey Research

Case study: national crime victimization survey.

Research Study

Criminal Victimization in the United States 1

Research Question

How many violent and property crime victimizations occurred in the United States in 2010?

Methodology

The results of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are provided on an annual basis by the U.S. Census Bureau and serve as an alternative to the Uniform Crime Reports. The NCVS collects information on the violent crimes of rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault, and the property crimes of household burglary, motor vehicle theft, and theft. The results are derived from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households selected through a stratified, multistage cluster sampling process (see Chapter 3). The survey results are based on data gathered from residents living throughout the United States, including persons living in group quarters, such as dormitories, rooming houses, and religious group dwellings. Armed Forces personnel living in military barracks and institutionalized persons, such as prison inmates, are not included in the survey.

Each housing unit selected for the NCVS remains in the sample for 3 years, with each of the seven interviews taking place at 6-month intervals. An NCVS interviewer’s first contact with a household selected for the survey is in person and the survey is completed through a face-to-face interview. The interviewer may conduct subsequent interviews by telephone. To elicit more accurate reporting of incidents, the NCVS uses a self-report method that includes a direct interview with each person 12 years or older in the household. In 2010, 40,974 households and 73,283 individuals age 12 and older were interviewed for the NCVS. Each household was interviewed twice during the year. The response rate was 92.3% of households and 87.5% of eligible individuals.

The NCVS has been collecting data on personal and household victimization since 1973. The data include type of crime, month, time and location of the crime, relationship between victim and offender, characteristics of the offender, self-protective actions taken by the victim during the incident and results of those actions, consequences of the victimization, type of property lost, whether the crime was reported to the police and reasons for reporting or not reporting, and offender use of weapons, drugs, and alcohol. Basic demographic information such as age, race, gender, and income is also collected to enable analysis of victimization by various subpopulations.

During 2010, U.S. residents age 12 or older experienced an estimated 18.7 million violent and property crime victimizations, down from 20.1 million in 2009 and 24.2 million in 2001. The criminal victimizations in 2010 included an estimated 3.8 million violent victimizations and 14.8 million property victimizations. Violent and serious violent victimizations (includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault) declined by nearly 34% between 2001 and 2010.

From 2001 to 2010, weapon violence (26% to 22%) and stranger-perpetrated violence (44% to 39%) declined. Between 2001 and 2010, about 6% to 9% of all violent victimizations were committed with firearms. This percentage has remained stable since 2004. The percentage of victims of violent crimes who suffered an injury during the victimization increased from 24% in 2008 to 29% in 2010. About 50% of all violent victimizations and nearly 40% of property crimes were reported to the police in 2010. These percentages have remained stable over the past 10 years. Males (15.7 per 1,000 population) and females (14.2 per 1,000 population) had similar rates of violent victimization during 2010.

Limitations with the Study Procedure

While rape or sexual assault significantly increased from 2009 to 2010, you should be cautious in interpreting this change because the estimates of rape/sexual assault are based on a small number of cases reported to the interviewers. Small changes in the number of victimizations can result in large year-to-year percentage changes. For instance, the 2010 estimate of rape or sexual assault is based on 57 reported cases compared to 36 reported cases in 2009. This represents an increase of 21 actual cases but also represents a 49.6% increase in the national estimate of rape or sexual assault from 2009 to 2010. The measurement of rape or sexual assault represents one of the most serious challenges in the field of victimization research. Rape and sexual assault remain sensitive subjects that are difficult to ask about in the survey context.

Any time national estimates are derived from a sample rather than the entire population, as is the case with the NCVS, because of sampling error it is important to be cautious when drawing conclusions about the size of one population estimate in comparison to another (e.g., does aggravated assault occur more frequently than robbery?) or about whether population estimates are changing over time (e.g., did robbery increase or decrease in the past year?). Although one figure may be larger than another, the NCVS estimates are based on responses from a sample of the population. Therefore, each estimate has some degree of sampling error. The sampling error of a population estimate depends on several factors, including the amount of variation in the responses, the size and representativeness of the sample, and the size of the subgroup for which the estimate is computed, as illustrated in the rape or sexual assault example previously discussed.

In addition to sampling error, the NCVS results are subject to non-sampling error. While substantial care is taken in the NCVS to reduce the sources of non-sampling error throughout all the survey operations, an unknown amount of non-sampling error still remains. A major source of non-sampling error includes the inability of the respondents to recall in detail the crimes that occurred during the six months prior to the interview. The NCVS uses a 6-month reference period. Respondents are asked to report victimization experiences occurring in the last 6 months. Generally, respondents are able to recall more accurately an event that occurred within 3 months of the interview rather than one that occurred within 6 months. Research indicates that assault is recalled with the least accuracy of any crime measured by the NCVS. This may be related to the tendency of victims to not report crimes committed by offenders who are not strangers, especially if they are relatives. Recall problems may result in an understatement of the actual rate of assault.

However, a shorter reference period would require more field interviews per year, increasing the data collection costs significantly. These increased costs would have to be balanced by cost reductions elsewhere (sample size is often considered). Reducing sample size however, reduces the precision of estimates of relatively rare crimes such as rape or sexual assault. In light of these trade-offs of cost and precision, a reference period of 6 months is used for the NCVS.

Other sources of non-sampling error can result from other types of response mistakes, including errors in reporting incidents as crimes, misclassification of crimes, systematic data errors introduced by the interviewer, and errors made in coding and processing the data.

Impact on Criminal Justice

The NCVS is one of the two national sources of crime data in the United States. The NCVS is generally viewed as a more reliable and valid measure of crime than the Uniform Crime Reports. The data from the NCVS survey are particularly useful for calculating crime rates, both aggregated and disaggregated, and for determining changes in crime rates from year to year. In addition, the NCVS is the primary source of information on the characteristics of criminal victimization and on the number and types of crimes not reported to law enforcement authorities. It provides the largest national forum for victims to describe the impact of crime and the characteristics of violent offenders.

In This Chapter You Will Learn

Why nonresponse is a major source of survey error and how nonresponse impacts survey results

The four main mechanisms for assessing validity as well as how to increase the validity of survey questions and responses

How to assess the reliability of survey questions and responses as well as ways to increase reliability

The methods in which surveys are distributed and the strengths and weaknesses of each

Introduction

Survey research involves the collection of information from individuals through their responses to questions, and represents one of the most widely used research tools in crime and criminal justice studies. Surveys are one of the most common ways to obtain information about attitudes and behaviors and involve collecting information from people via self-administered surveys, telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and more recently Internet and e-mail–based surveys.

In survey research, the main way of collecting information is by asking people questions. Their answers constitute the data to be analyzed. For example, the U.S. Census is a self-administered survey where individuals receive surveys in the mail and are asked to fill them out and send them back to the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition to the counting of people, the U.S. Census collects data about the race, age, household composition, education, type of housing, and many other characteristics of the people counted. As presented in the introductory case study, the NCVS is another example of a large-scale survey where data is collected via face-to-face and telephone interviews.

Most people are familiar with surveys, especially those that involve the measurement of public opinion for newspaper and magazine articles, the measurement of political perceptions and opinions involving politicians, and marketing research designed to understand consumer preferences and interests. In fact, we are inundated with surveys in our daily lives. From the restaurant that offers you a free appetizer on a future visit for completing a telephone survey about your experience, to the call center that wants your feedback on the performance of the customer service representative at the conclusion of your phone call, to solicitations to complete online surveys regarding your website experience, to the evaluation of your professor at the end of the semester, we don’t have to look far for an example of a survey in our daily lives.

The same is true for research in criminology and criminal justice. Surveys are frequently the data collection method of choice to answer research questions. For example, if we want to know whether the police officers in our local police department prefer to work 8-, 10-, or 12-hour shifts, we can survey them to address this issue. If we want to determine the level of fear of crime on a college campus, we can survey students, faculty, staff, and visitors to gauge their level of fear of crime. If we want to know if the public agrees with recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, we can survey residents and ask them their opinion. If we want to understand how correctional officers view their roles and interactions with inmates, we can survey the officers regarding the topic. If we want to identify the extent, causes, and consequences of bullying, we can survey students to better understand bullying. Overall, surveys can be used to answer a wide range of research questions involving crime and the operation of the criminal justice system.

Three characteristics of surveys make them a preferable source of data collection in comparison to other sources. 2 First, probability sampling is typically used in surveys, which enables the research consumer to have confidence that the sample is not a biased one and is a reflection of the larger population. Data from research studies using a probability sample are definitely preferred over data from a non-probability sample, such as those who attend a college class or happen to be convenient to survey. Second, standardized measurement (i.e., each respondent is asked the same questions in the same manner) ensures that comparable information is obtained about everyone who responds to the survey. Standardized measurement produces meaningful statistics and comparisons of respondents (e.g., how are juveniles who are chronically truant different from juveniles who are not?). Third, the development of a survey ensures that all the data needed for a given analysis are available. For example, you may find in your literature that parental supervision is an important factor that distinguishes truants from nontruants. Since you are creating the survey, you can be sure to ask questions about the respondent’s level of parental supervision so the relationship between truancy and parental supervision can be addressed in your study.

Survey Components

Surveys bring together sampling, question design, and methods of survey distribution. It is important to note that each of these activities has many applications outside of surveys, but their presence is essential to quality surveys. For consumers of research, it is important to understand how the details of each component of a survey can affect its precision, consistency, and accuracy (i.e., its reliability and validity). How the sample is selected, which questions are asked, and the procedures used to collect the answers all impact the quality of the survey and its results. 3

Sampling With the U.S. Census as an exception, survey information is typically collected from a sample of the population, rather than from every member of the population. The ability to select a sample that is representative of the whole population was a significant development that made surveys a useful research tool. The keys to good sampling are finding a way to give all (or nearly all) members of the population the same (or a known) chance of being selected and using probability sampling methods for choosing the sample. 4

Every survey involves a number of decisions that have the potential to enhance or detract from the accuracy of the survey results. With respect to sampling, critical issues include the following: the choice of whether or not to use a probability sample, the size of the sample, the sampling technique utilized, and the rate of response (the percentage of those sampled who respond to the survey). Since sampling was covered in detail in Chapter 3, it will not be revisited in this chapter. At this point, realize that probability sampling techniques are typically used in surveys. Therefore, the material covered in Chapter 3 is applicable to survey development and distribution. This chapter will discuss the response rate for surveys since it directly applies to surveys and was not covered in Chapter 3.

Survey Question Design In surveys, the questions measure the concepts and variables under study. Survey question design is a critical element of survey research. Sticking with the theme of this book regarding the development of educated consumers of research, the focus on question design in this chapter will not be on how to write survey questions but on strategies for evaluating the quality of the questions. Survey researchers evaluate questions to find out if they are well understood by the respondents and if the answers are meaningful. In other words, the reliability and validity of the survey questions must be assessed in determining the quality of the survey. The researcher must decide the extent to which previous literature regarding the reliability and validity of questions will be drawn upon in the development of the survey as well as the process for question evaluation.

Methods of Survey Distribution Surveys can be distributed through several means, including face-to-face or telephone interviews or through self-administered means via the mail or Internet. Some surveys have respondents answer self-administered questions while others use an interviewer to ask questions and record answers. When interviewers are used, it is important to avoid having them influence the answers given by the respondents. The decision about which mode of data collection to use has important cost implications and affects the quality of the data that will be collected. 5

The three components of survey development (i.e., sampling, question design, and methods of distribution) are interrelated because the quality of the survey data will not be better than the most error-prone feature of the survey design. A large sample size will not make up for a low rate of response. Similarly, a high response rate will not compensate for unreliable and invalid survey questions. Survey researchers must focus on each component of the survey, including sampling, question design, and method of distribution, because weaknesses in one area cannot be rectified by the strengths of another area.

Since sampling has already been covered in Chapter 3, this chapter discusses question design and methods of survey distribution. A concentrated effort is made to discuss the realities and the practical problems with the decisions made by survey researchers. The goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of the sources of error in surveys and the range of methodological issues that arise when using surveys. Although survey research is a common way to solicit information from a wide variety of individuals, it is not without its limitations, which will be discussed throughout this chapter. We begin our discussion with an overview of the sources of error in survey research.

Issues in Survey Development: Nonresponse and Survey Design

Sampling error, as discussed in Chapter 3, occurs because the sample drawn from a population will not exactly match the population. For example, survey results from a sample of citizens on attitudes toward the use of the death penalty will not be identical to the overall survey results if an entire state population of citizens was surveyed. As discussed in Chapter 3, the difference in survey results between a sample and a population is called sampling error. Researchers expect there to be a difference between the sample results and the results from an entire population, even when the sample is representative of the population. They just try to minimize the error as much as possible.

When a sample is drawn, it is inevitable that the sample will differ from the population from which it was drawn. The way the sample is drawn (e.g., probability vs. non-probability sampling) can affect how closely the sample is likely to mirror the characteristics of the population. Regardless of the sophistication of the sampling strategy, by chance, the sample will differ slightly from what it would look like if it was an exact mirror image of the population. One of the goals of survey research is to minimize the random, by chance differences between the sample and the population.

Nonresponse

Nonresponse is a major source of survey error. There are three categories of nonrespondents (i.e., those selected to be in a sample who do not actually respond to the survey) 6 :

1. Those who did not receive the survey, thereby not giving them a chance to respond to the survey. For example, this includes mailed surveys that are undeliverable due to bad addresses and telephone surveys that fail to call when the potential respondent is available to answer the phone.

2. Those who receive the survey but refuse to complete it. For example, this includes potential respondents who refuse to participate in the NCVS even though their household has been selected for participation. In 2010, 7.7% of the sampled households refused to participate in the survey. 7

3. Those asked to participate in the survey but are unable to perform the task required of them. This includes people who are too ill to be interviewed, who have language barriers, or whose reading and writing skills preclude them from completing a self-administered survey.

Failure to collect survey data from a high percentage of those selected to be in a sample is a major source of survey error. 8 When it comes to surveys, the quality of the results not only depends on how well the sample is a close approximation of the population but also how well those who respond to the survey reflect the total population. The method of distribution that a researcher decides to use can have a major influence on the response rate and the extent to which nonrespondents introduce bias into the results. As discussed later in this chapter, some methods of distribution (e.g., face-to-face interviews) have higher response rates than other distribution methods (e.g., mailed surveys). Overall, a low response rate will bias the sample, which means that the nonresponse makes the respondents systematically different from the population from which they were drawn, thereby producing biased results. For example, let’s say we surveyed 100 physicians on the effects of energy drinks on general health, and 50 returned the survey, for a response rate of 50%. The question we should consider is, “How do the 50% who did not respond differ from the 50% who did?” In this circumstance, if we had the other 50% of the responses, they might totally change the results of the study.

Calculating Response Rates In assessing the quality of a research project that used a survey to collect data, the response rate is a basic parameter for evaluating a project. Simply, the response rate is the number of people who respond to the survey divided by the number of people sampled. The denominator includes all people in the sample who were selected as a potential survey respondent but did not respond for whatever reason. This includes the three categories of nonrespondents previously listed, including those who do not receive the survey, those who receive the survey but refuse to participate, and those who are asked to participate in the survey but are unable to perform the task required of them.

Since the response rate is a simple way to assess the quality of a study involving a survey, researchers want to demonstrate a high response rate. To this end, some researchers do not include some of the categories of nonrespondents in the calculation of the response rate, which artificially inflates the response rate for the study. Most commonly, the category of nonrespondents that are excluded from the response rate calculation are those who did not receive the survey.

For example, let’s say that a sample of 1,000 college students has been selected for a survey, designed to be completed via telephone interviews, on criminal victimization on campus. In this fictitious study, 500 students completed the survey, 100 students refused to complete the survey and hung up on the interviewer, while another 400 never answered their phone despite numerous calls. What is the response rate? Based on the discussion above, the response rate is 50%. The response rate is the number of people who complete the survey (i.e., 500) divided by the number of people sampled (i.e., 1,000). However, some researchers will exclude the 400 potential respondents who were in the sample but never answered their phone despite repeated attempts. With this exclusion, the response rate is now 83.3%, which is much higher, and therefore better, because the researcher has only included those who completed the survey and those who refused to do so in the response rate (i.e., 500/600).

As an educated consumer of research, you need to be cautious when interpreting response rates. It is important to specifically know how the reported response rate was calculated. As illustrated in the example, differences in the way response rates are calculated can make comparisons across studies difficult. Instead of reporting a response rate, some researchers will report a “completion rate,” which excludes those who did not receive the survey from the calculation. In our above example, the completion rate is 83.3% because the 400 students who never answered the phone are excluded in the calculation. The completion rate will always be higher than the response rate as outlined above, which includes selected but uncontacted individuals in the denominator. Although a response rate seems simple to calculate, be sure to remember that it is important to understand how the response rate was calculated before you decide if the response rate is high.

The Impact of Nonresponse You may now be wondering what is an acceptable response rate. Babbie 9 has suggested that a 50% response rate is adequate, 60% is good, and 70% is very good. Besides focusing on the numeric value of the response rate and how it fits with Babbie’s categorization, it is more important to determine if those who did respond are a representative cross section of the sampled group than it is to have a high response rate. In other words, it is critical for the survey researcher to assess if there are significant differences between the respondents and the sample.

In addition, ideally, a researcher will have meaningful information on those who did not respond. Demographic variables such as education, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and income may be helpful in assessing differences between respondents and nonrespondents. An assessment could show that those who did respond to the survey were quite similar in terms of education, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and income to those who did not respond. If the respondents and nonrespondents are quite similar, a researcher could legitimately analyze the results of a survey even if the response rate was extremely low (e.g., 10%). Basically, the effect of nonresponse on survey results depends on the percentage not responding and the extent to which those not responding are biased (i.e., systematically different from the population). Again, the issue isn’t specifically about the response rate, but more critically about whether the respondents and nonrespondents are similar or different on key characteristics that are related to the research questions.

Another issue that needs to be considered in determining the adequacy of the response rate is the population studied. You would expect a higher response rate from a survey of students in the Introduction to Criminal Justice course at your university than from a citizen survey in the same community, even though the topic may be the same. The students probably have a preexisting relationship with the researcher, which, coupled with the use of a group-administered survey (discussed later in this chapter), will lead to a higher response rate in comparison to a survey that is mailed to community residents. In addition, individuals that have an interest in the survey topic are more likely to respond to a survey than those who are less interested. Therefore, you can expect a higher response rate from a survey of police chiefs in California regarding the role of municipal police departments in fighting terrorism than from a survey of California residents on the same topic. Therefore, the adequacy of a response rate is more complex than merely looking at the number and determining how it measures up to Babbie’s stated standards.

An example of significant bias from low response and poor sampling where the respondents were significantly different from the population is the classic Literary Digest presidential poll in 1936. The survey, which was administered via mail, predicted a victory for Alf Landon in an election that Franklin Roosevelt won by a huge margin. The sample of addresses for the mailed survey was selected from telephone books. At the time, not everyone had a telephone so most voters were not listed in the telephone book. In addition, Republicans (those in Landon’s party) were much more likely to have telephones in 1936. Furthermore, only a minority of those asked to return questionnaires did so, which also led to the inaccurate survey results.

Overall, nonresponse is a problematic source of survey error. As the response rate decreases, it becomes more likely that the nonrespondents will differ from the survey respondents. When there are significant differences between respondents and nonrespondents, each group represents biased subgroups of the total population. Bias means that in some systematic way the individuals responding to a survey are different from the overall population. Therefore, the results based on the survey respondents are not reflective of the overall population.

Although we can calculate a response rate, we usually do not know for sure the impact of nonresponse on the survey results. Perhaps the strongest argument for efforts to increase response rates is credibility. 14 When response rates are high, there is only a small potential for error due to nonresponse to have a significant impact on the survey results. When response rates are low, there is great potential for error due to nonresponse to have a significant impact on the survey results. Finally, a low response rate also provides critics of the survey results an easy, intuitive basis on which to say the data are not credible.

WHAT RESEARCH SHOWS: IMPACTING CRIMINAL JUSTICE OPERATIONS

What Causes Inmates to Riot? 10

Early research into the causes of prison riots focused primarily upon the deprivations that are part of the prison environment. Gresham Sykes 11 provided one of the first analyses of prison riots when he explored the causes of two riots that took place at the New Jersey State Prison in the spring of 1952. Sykes attributed the riots to changes in the inmate social system that had stripped the inmates of their control. Based on his observations, Sykes believed that the transfer of power from the inmate social system to prison staff exaggerated the deprivations experienced by inmates and contributed to the riots. His insights, however, failed to provide a complete understanding of why inmates rioted. Overcrowding, poor living conditions, lack of programming, guard brutality, poor administration, and a concentration of violence-prone inmates have all been cited as contributing factors to riots despite the fact that these conditions also exist in prisons where no riots have ever taken place. Further, Sykes’ explanations of prison riots were based on a case study (see Chapter 6) from a single prison facility where a riots had occurred.

In an effort to formulate a more comprehensive explanation for why inmates riot, Richard Wilsnack examined data from 48 state prisons. Included in his sample were prisons that had experienced a riot, some other type of collective inmate violence (e.g., work stoppage and hunger strikes), as well as prisons with no reported collective violence. He was the first to conduct a large-scale quantitative study of collective inmate violence. He created a 160-question survey that was mailed to 51 correctional institutions, including the largest state prison institution for each state and the District of Columbia. All of the prisons housed adult males convicted of felony crimes and were medium or maximum security facilities. Institutions were selected to be representative of the types of prisons where riots were most likely to occur. Only three states—Alabama, Kansas, and Mississippi—failed to respond to the survey, for a response rate of 94%. To improve the reliability of responses, questions were constructed in such a way that respondents had to provide only simple replies.

Twelve of the prisons surveyed reported a riot during the study period. The study identified several contributing factors to the riots. First, an analysis of prison conditions revealed that inmate deprivation, disorganization, and conflict existed in prisons where riots had taken place. Three-fourths of the prisons reporting a riot had experienced an increase in inmate assault and/or had at least one occurrence of an inmate assault on a guard. Second, administrative instability and conflict were related to prison riots. Three-fourths of the prisons reporting a riot had experienced major administrative changes (i.e., turnover or extended absences) and conflict among staff members. While a shortage of correctional staff was not related to the occurrence of a riot, low salaries and high staff turnover were found to be associated. Third, external pressures existed in prisons where riots had taken place. Wilsnack found that pressure and publicity from outside of the prison were also related to the occurrence of a riot. All of the riots had taken place in institutions where legislators and concerned citizens had tried to influence prison operations. In addition, 80% of these institutions had received some type of media coverage prior to the riot. Overall, riots were more likely to occur in maximum security prisons with overcrowding and unoccupied inmates. Furthermore, riots were more likely to occur in facilities where inmates of different ages, convictions, and prior records were all housed together. Wilsnack’s findings did not support Sykes’ contention that riots occurred as a result of a disruption of the inmate social structure.

Wilsnack’s quantitative study of inmate collective violence enhanced our understanding of prison riots and other forms of collective prison disturbances. Despite the difficulties in researching prison riots, our understanding of the causes has grown significantly over the past several decades. Researchers have uncovered many of the conditions associated with prison riots and several theories have been developed to explain their occurrence. Prison administrators today are better equipped to respond to prison riots with emergency response teams. These teams consist of officers trained in hostage negotiation and disturbance control.

This body of research has also helped prison administrators develop preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of riots. Regular security audits, consistent enforcement of rules and procedures, maintaining effective communication between inmates, staff, and administrators, providing inmates with structured activities and appropriate programs, and using inmate classification systems are all important strategies for preventing the occurrence of riots. 12 The number of prison riots has significantly declined since the 1970s, despite the large increases in the number of inmates. According to Useem and Piehl, 13 this trend can be attributed to more effective prison management.

Survey Question Design

Designing a good survey instrument involves selecting survey questions that are needed to answer your research questions. As discussed in Chapter 1, one of the initial steps in any research project is to develop a research question or questions. The same is true for survey research. Since responses to the survey questions are the data collected in surveys, the survey responses are used to answer your research questions. Therefore, it is critical that questions included in the survey are able to answer your research question. For example, if your research question is, “Is there a relationship between parental supervision and chronic truancy?” you need to ask survey questions that can measure the variables identified in the research question: parental supervision and chronic truancy. Designing a question for a survey instrument is designing a measure.

Besides the recognition that the survey questions must be able to be used to answer the research questions, how do researchers know what to ask on a survey? When building a questionnaire, a survey researcher has two sources for survey questions. First, the researcher can include survey questions that have been used in other surveys. When another researcher has already designed a quality set of questions to measure a variable in your research question, it is recommended that you use the items from the preexisting survey, with a few caveats. First, the existing survey questions must be reliable and valid, which will be discussed in the next section. For now, this basically means that the survey questions must be a quality measurement of the variable. For example, if you are creating a survey to address criminal victimization on your campus, a great starting point for developing the survey questions is to use the NCVS, covered in the chapter opening case study, as a template for your survey questions. You can certainly modify the questions to meet your specific needs, but the NCVS is a high-quality measurement of criminal victimization and so it is a reasonable place to start when creating the survey questions. Second, you need to provide appropriate citation to the original developer of the survey questions in the research manuscript. For example, Rosenberg 15 developed a measure of self-esteem that is the most often used measure of self-esteem in survey research. In order to use the 10-question measure of self-esteem or a modified version, the researcher must provide appropriate citation to its original source.

A good source for prior surveys on a wide range of topics is the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. 16 Your university probably belongs to the ICPSR. ICPSR is a website depository where major social and political survey files are archived. If your university belongs to ICPSR, you can get codebooks for any study on file at ICPSR. The codebooks include the actual survey questions asked and the response formats used. The studies archived at the ICPSR cover a wide range of criminal justice and criminology topics, so it is a good starting place if you are ever tasked with developing a survey.

Second, when building a questionnaire, a researcher can include items that she has personally constructed. This is the favored option when a satisfactory measure of the variable does not already exist or the variables in the research question are unique. Despite the discussion above, do not think that every good question about a topic has already been asked. And do not think that the questions perfectly suiting your purposes have already been formulated. Finally, it is certainly reasonable to use both options (i.e., prior surveys and personally constructed items) when constructing a survey. As you are reading and evaluating survey research, the researcher should inform you about the source of the questions: whether based upon prior surveys or if questions were developed by the researcher.

RESEARCH IN THE NEWS

Want a Job? Check the Spelling on Your Facebook Profile. 1 7

When it comes to looking for jobs, you better put your best Facebook forward. Recruiters are looking, and frankly, they are not impressed with your poor grammar or posts about your latest unforgettable exploits, according to a new survey. The survey was conducted by social recruiting platform Jobvite. The company surveyed more than 1,000 human resources and recruitment professionals on their social recruiting activities and intentions with over 800 responding to the survey. Respondents answered questions using an online survey tool.

In addition to checking your résumé, nearly 3 out of 4 hiring managers and recruiters check candidates’ social profiles, even if they are not provided on your résumé, with some of the content garnering negative reactions. Content that recruiters especially frown on includes references to using illegal drugs (78% negative) and posts of a sexual nature (67% negative). Profanity in posts and tweets garnered a 61 % negative reaction, and almost half (47%) reacted negatively to posts about alcohol consumption. Worse than drinking, grammar or spelling mistakes on social profiles saw a 54% negative reaction from respondents. However, recruiters and hiring managers tend to be neutral in their reactions to political opinions (62% neutral) and religious posts (53% neutral).

Survey Questions and Answers: The Presence of Error

In order to conceptualize the error associated with answers to survey questions, it important to address what a survey is designed to measure. At its most basic, surveys try to measure two items: objective facts and subjective states. Objective facts include the number of times a person has been arrested, whether or not a person has used marijuana in the past week, and whether or not a person has been the victim of theft in the past 6 months. Subjective states include a person’s level of attachment to his parents and a person’s viewpoint on the primary purpose of prisons.

As will be discussed in the next section, the way we assess the answers to a survey question is to measure how well they correspond to the truth. If you are asking survey respondents about objective facts (e.g., how many times have you been arrested?), you can obtain independent information (e.g., criminal history information from a statewide database) against which to evaluate the answers to the survey question. Unfortunately, there is no objective way to verify or evaluate a person’s report about a subjective state (e.g., viewpoint on the primary purpose of prisons). There is no way to independently assess whether the person is telling the truth, which can cause error in the survey results.

A defining characteristic of survey research is that answers to the survey questions are used as the measurements of the concepts and variables in the study. The extent to which those answers are good measures of the concepts and variables is obviously a critical dimension of the quality of survey results. The extent to which the answers are not good measures creates survey error. Survey error comes from several areas, including misunderstanding the question, not having the information needed to answer, and distorting answers in order to look good, to name a few. 18 For example, respondents typically underreport how much alcohol they drink and overstate their income. Survey results of alcohol consumption and income are likely to be biased (i.e., systematically different from the true scores). The issue is that to the extent that answers are impacted by factors other than the facts on which the answer should be based, there is error in the answer. 19 The next section discusses the quality of the survey measurement and related error by discussing reliability and validity.

Survey Measurement Quality: Validity and Reliability

Assessing the quality (i.e., accuracy and consistency) of a survey measurement is a critical part of the research process. A survey researcher can spend days developing what he views as an excellent survey, but if the survey questions and responses are not accurate and consistent, the results of the study are questionable. Accurate and consistent survey questions and responses are essential to getting accurate results and making conclusions that reflect the true reality of the topic being studied. Specifically, the two key components of survey quality are reliability and validity. In order to be a high-quality measurement, survey questions and responses must be both reliable and valid. Reliability is necessary for quality measurement, but not sufficient. A quality measure must also be valid. Similarly, just because a measure is valid doesn’t necessarily mean it is reliable, and validity means little if the measure used is not reliable.

Validity addresses the accuracy of the measurement and refers to the extent to which researchers measure what they planned to measure. Validity refers to the accuracy and trustworthiness of survey instruments, data, and findings. The question asked when assessing validity is: “Are the survey questions measuring what they are intended to measure?”

Reliability addresses the consistency of a measurement and refers to whether or not you get the same answer if you use an instrument to measure something more than once. For example, if a police radar gun is used to measure the speed of two vehicles going the same speed and the same results are obtained, then the radar gun is reliable. Similarly, if a breathalyzer is administered to two individuals with the same blood alcohol level and the breathalyzer gets the same results each time, then the breathalyzer is reliable. In these cases, the radar gun is a reliable measure of the speed of automobiles, and the breathalyzer is a reliable measure of blood alcohol content (i.e., level of intoxication).

As previously discussed, surveys generally assess two different types of information: objective facts and subjective states. Generally, it is easier to accurately and consistently measure objective facts than subjective states. For example, it is easier to accurately and consistently measure a survey respondent’s gender, race, ethnicity, and education level (i.e., objective facts) than it is to measure a survey respondent’s opinion (i.e., subjective state) regarding the level and quality of police service provided to the community. The extent to which a survey is unreliable and invalid creates measurement error, which is a persistent problem in criminal justice and criminology research. One of the major sources of error in research studies is poor quality of the measurements.

Both validity and reliability must be present for high-quality research results. This section will address ways to measure and increase the validity and reliability of a measurement. It is important to note that validity and reliability do not just apply to survey research but to measurement completed in all research designs, including experimental designs (Chapter 5), field research (Chapter 6), case studies (Chapter 6), secondary data analysis (Chapter 7), and content analysis (Chapter 7). Since this is the first chapter to discuss measurement, a comprehensive review of validity and reliability is presented here. As you proceed through the remainder of this book, keep in mind that validity and reliability apply to all types of measurement that are completed in research studies.

Assessing Validity

Validity addresses the accuracy of the measurement and refers to the extent to which the survey questions and responses measure what they were supposed to measure. In other words, are the survey questions and responses good indicators of what the researchers are trying to study? Stated another way, are the survey questions and responses measuring what they are intended to measure? There are numerous ways to assess the validity of measures. The ways range from simply asking if the measures seem like logical and common sense ways to measure the concepts and variables (i.e., face validity) to the complexity of determining whether the measures fit the theoretical constructs of the concept being measured (i.e., construct validity). Even though researchers may use sophisticated ways to assess the validity of their measures, concerns about the validity of the measure may still persist because of the complexity of the concepts studied by criminal justice and criminology researchers. In addition, validity is never proven; instead, invalidity is reduced, and when this occurs researchers express greater confidence in their data and the results of their study. There are several ways of assessing if the measures used in a study are valid: face, content, criterion-related, and construct validity. The different means of assessing validity vary by complexity and subjectivity.

Face validity, the simplest and most subjective means to measure validity, assesses whether the survey questions are a logical and common sense way to measure the concept. Basically, face validity involves an assessment of the survey questions to see if on “face value” the questions seem to be measuring the concepts and variables they are supposed to be measuring. Face validity answers the simple question, “Do the survey questions look like they measure what they are supposed to be measuring?” For example, if a researcher is measuring fear of crime, does the survey instrument ask questions about specific types of crime and the level of fear for each? If so, the survey has face validity.

Face validity is sometimes developed based on establishing a consensus among researchers that the measure is a valid way to measure the concept. For example, if researchers generally agree that asking someone “How many times have you been arrested?” is a valid measure of prior arrests, then, until proven otherwise, the question is a valid measure of prior arrests. However, because face validity is entirely a matter of judgment, there can be great disagreement among researchers and consumers of research about whether a survey question has face validity.

Content validity is subjective, just like face validity, but is somewhat more complex than face validity. It occurs when the survey questions measure the full breadth and depth of the concept being studied. For example, let’s say that when you have completed Chapters 1–4 of this book, you are scheduled to take an exam over Chapters 1–4. What if when you take the exam, your professor only asks questions about sampling, which is covered in Chapter 3? You would probably argue that the test was not fair and was not a good measure of your knowledge of Chapters 1–4 because it only covered Chapter 3. What you are stating is that the test, as a measurement of knowledge of the material covered in Chapters 1–4, lacks content validity. In order to have content validity, the test should have included questions over Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4.

As another example, there exists a traditional measure of fear of crime that lacks content validity. Traditionally, fear of crime was measured in surveys based on the response to the question, “How safe do you feel walking alone in your neighborhood at night?” This question lacks content validity because it does not measure the full breadth and depth of someone’s fear of crime. It is basically limited to fear of street crimes like robbery and assault, but does not include crimes that people fear but occur in their residences, such as sexual assault, family violence, burglary, and theft. Also, the question is limited to your neighborhood, whereas you may have a high level of fear of crime but it is due to getting off late at night from your job and having to walk through a deserted parking garage to get to your car. Furthermore, the question is time dependent, only asking about fear of crime at night.

When it comes to criminal justice and criminology research, content validity is difficult to obtain because researchers are trying to measure complex concepts. When studying criminal offending, it is difficult to ask about all types of crimes; there are just too many. Similarly, when studying drug use, it is difficult to ask about all types of drugs. However, just as discussed with face validity, consensus among researchers is used to determine content validity.

Criterion-related validity is more complex and less subjective than face and content validity. Criterion-related validity is assessed by determining the strength of the relationship between the responses to the survey and another measurement, the criterion, to which it should be related if the measurement is valid. For example, let’s say that you want to create a measure of self-esteem. As previously mentioned in this chapter, the 10-question measure of self-esteem created by Rosenberg in the 1960s is a valid measure of self-esteem. You create a 16-question measure of self-esteem but will want to determine if the measure is valid. You can give a sample of people a survey that includes both the Rosenberg questions and your new questions about self-esteem. You can then determine the relationship between the responses to your measure of self-esteem in comparison to Rosenberg’s questions, the criteria. If individuals that have high self-esteem according to Rosenberg’s measure consistently have high self-esteem according to your new measure of self-esteem, then your measure has criterion-related validity. If individuals have high self-esteem according to Rosenberg’s measure but consistently have low self-esteem according to your new measure, then your measurement of self-esteem lacks criterion-related validity.

As another example, you may be interested in pursuing law school after completing your bachelor’s degree. Admission committees at law schools use the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) to predict success in law school. They prefer to admit students with high LSAT scores because they believe those are the students most likely to do well in law school. If there is a strong relationship between the LSAT score and success in law school as measured by law school grades, then the LSAT has high criterion-related validity. The LSAT is related to something that it should be related to, in this case, law school grades.

There are two types of criterion-related validity: concurrent and predictive validity. A measurement has high criterion-related validity, more specifically high concurrent validity, when there is a strong relationship between a new measure and a measure that is known to be valid. The example above regarding Rosenberg and a new measure of self-esteem is an example of concurrent validity. Concurrent validity occurs when an experimental measure (e.g., your new self-esteem measurement) and a valid measure (e.g., Rosenberg’s self-esteem scale) measure the same thing at the same time (i.e., concurrently).

Concurrent validity is also assessed when a response to a survey item is compared to the same information from a different data source. For example, let’s say your professor asks your current grade point average on a self-administered survey. Then, your professor uses your university’s information system to obtain your official GPA. The more these two numbers correspond (i.e., your stated GPA and your official GPA), the higher the concurrent validity of the survey measurement of GPA. In criminal justice and criminology research, this process can occur to validate survey information that is also stored by criminal justice agencies such as prior arrests, convictions, and incarcerations, to name a few.

Another way to assess concurrent validity is to use what is sometimes referred to as the known group comparison technique. Let’s say that you want to develop a measure of religiosity because you want to study the impact of religious beliefs on delinquent activities. Although valid measures of religiosity exist, you want to develop your own measure. After you have developed the survey questions, you administer the survey to members of the clergy and members of Atheist Alliance International (AAI). If your survey measure of religiosity shows that the members of the clergy have high levels of religiosity and members of AAI have low levels of religiosity, then you have established the concurrent validity of your measure. The items in your survey measurement are measuring what they were intended to measure (i.e., level of religious beliefs). If the measurement doesn’t differentiate the level of religious beliefs between members of the clergy and AAI, then there is something wrong with your survey questions.

Another type of criterion-related validity assesses how accurately a measurement predicts some future, rather than current, outcome similar to the example previously discussed regarding the LSAT as a prediction of law school success. This type of validity is referred to as predictive validity. Let’s say that you develop a set of survey items that is designed to determine if someone will be a successful police officer. A local police department decides to assist you with your study and allows you to issue your survey to the current police recruit academy class of 175 cadets. You track these police recruits for the next three years after completion of the police academy and field training program. If the individuals who scored highest on your survey while in the academy are also the most likely to have received promotions, excellent performance evaluation reviews, and fewer disciplinary infractions, then your measure has predictive validity. Police departments can now use this measurement tool to screen potential police officers with confidence in its ability to predict future success.

We frequently use measures in the criminal justice system to make decisions, including whether a crime can be solved, whether someone should be let out of jail on bail, whether a person should be released from prison on parole, and whether a person should be placed on a general probation caseload or a specialized caseload. These measures are only as good as their level of predictive validity; ability to predict some future outcome. If they have predictive validity, then we can have confidence in the predictive accuracy of the measurement.

Another way of assessing the accuracy of a measure is to determine its construct validity. Similar to criterion-related validity, construct validity is more complex and less subjective than face and content validity. Construct validity assesses the extent to which a particular measure relates to other measures consistent with theoretically derived hypotheses concerning the concepts/variables that are being measured. Since construct validity is based on theory, it is favored by researchers.

For example, prior research has established a relationship between self-esteem and delinquency. Juveniles with high self-esteem are less likely to commit delinquent acts than juveniles with low self-esteem. You want to conduct a research study to test the following hypothesis: There is a relationship between self-esteem and delinquency. As presented in prior examples, let’s say that you want to create your own measure of self-esteem instead of using Rosenberg’s validated measure. You create your new 16-item measure of self-esteem and use a prior validated measure of delinquency. You administer the survey to the 8th graders in the middle school closest to your residence. The results show that those with high levels of self-esteem are less likely to commit acts of delinquency and those with low levels of self-esteem are more likely to commit acts of delinquency. This is exactly what was expected based on your theoretically derived hypothesis regarding the relationship between self-esteem and delinquency. Therefore, your new measure of self-esteem has construct validity. If the survey results would have shown that those most likely to be delinquent also have the highest levels of self-esteem, then your measurement of self-esteem would lack construct validity and the results of the study would be suspect. As depicted in the example, construct validity is based on actual research results and is not obtained until after the data has been collected and analyzed. Other researchers can begin to use your measure of self-esteem because you have shown that it has construct validity.

FIGURE 4.1 | Mechanisms for Assessing Validity

Increasing Validity

Now that we have presented the main approaches to assessing validity, we turn our attention to discussing ways to increase the validity of a survey instrument. As previously discussed, it is certainly reasonable for a researcher to use measures that have already been established as valid. If you are studying victimization on your college campus, it is certainly reasonable to develop your survey based on the National Crime Victimization Survey since the validity of this measurement has already been established. Even though a researcher may be using a previously established measure, there are validity issues that must be addressed in every research study. This section will discuss the major validity issues and the suggested means to overcome them, thereby increasing the validity of a research study. As an educated consumer of research, you should be aware of these issues as you review research reports. One significant validity issue with survey research is whether respondents are telling the truth.

Are the Respondents Telling the Truth? Aiding Respondent Recall Recall that validity is addressing the accuracy of the measurement. Survey responses are usually accurate and truthful when the survey questions ask about a behavior or incident that is easily remembered. Most offenders can easily remember how many times they have been arrested in the past month, but it is more difficult for a drug abuser to remember how many times they have used illicit drugs in the past month. It is likely that the number of arrests in the past month will be a more accurate response than the number of times an abuser has used drugs in the past month.

It is clear that a respondent’s ability to accurately recall events declines over time and accurately recalling events typically takes more time than the few seconds that a respondent has to answer a survey question. As discussed in the chapter opening case study, a major source of error of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) includes the inability of the respondents to recall in detail the crimes that occurred during the 6 months prior to the interview. The NCVS uses a 6-month reference period. Respondents are asked to report victimization experiences occurring in the last 6 months. Generally, respondents are able to recall more accurately an event that occurred within 3 months of the interview rather than one that occurred within 6 months. Research indicates that assault is recalled with the least accuracy of any crime measured by the NCVS. Recall problems may result in an underestimate of the actual rate of assault.

Survey researchers recognize that memory is less trustworthy than once assumed. In response, strategies have been developed to maximize respondent recall. Survey researchers should be as specific and recent as possible when asking about past events. You can improve accuracy by making the recall period for the survey questions recent. The problem of forgetting becomes increasingly serious as the respondent is asked to recall events stretching over a longer period of time. In addition, the researcher should clearly specify the behavior asked about. The complexity of respondent recall does not mean that survey researchers cannot ask about past events. Instead, survey researchers need to customize questions to shorten the recall period and interpret results cautiously as the recall period grows larger.

In addition, many respondents will telescope their responses. Telescoping occurs when a respondent brings behaviors and actions that occurred outside the recall period into the recall period. For example, let’s say that a person was assaulted 8 months ago and has not been assaulted since that time. The person is answering a survey question that asks “How many times have you been assaulted in the past 6 months?” and the survey respondent answers “one time.” The respondent has telescoped the victimization into the 6-month time frame even though it occurred 8 months ago and was outside the time frame provided by the researcher. Telescoping responses leads to overreporting of recent events and underreporting of distant events.

Are the Respondents Telling the Truth? Asking Embarrassing and Stigmatizing Questions People have a tendency to underreport embarrassing or stigmatizing events (e.g., hitting their children, being a sexual assault victim, and lying on their tax return). Criminal justice research asks about many potentially embarrassing and stigmatizing topics such as criminal offending, victimization, drug use, alcohol consumption, mental illness, and prison rape, to name a few, thus making truthful reporting a challenge in criminal justice research. Respondents may be embarrassed or afraid to give truthful answers and thus, underreport behaviors or attitudes they wish to hide from others. As an educated consumer of research, you need to be aware of and assess the strategies a researcher uses to increase the honesty of survey responses.

Dishonest answers can be difficult to detect, so what strategies exist to increase the honesty and therefore, accuracy of survey responses? First, researchers should inform respondents that their responses are, at a minimum, confidential, and if possible, anonymous. Anonymity infers that the survey respondent’s identity will not be known by the researcher. For example, if a professor hands out a survey in her class to the 150 people in attendance, asks them to respond to the survey and hand them to the end of the seating row where they are picked up by the professor, the surveys are anonymous. The professor does not know who filled out a particular survey. Anonymously collecting survey information, especially if it is of a sensitive or criminal nature, is one of the simplest ways to increase the honesty of responses. Respondents will be more honest regarding sensitive or embarrassing topics when they know their responses cannot be used to harm or embarrass them.

Confidentiality infers that although the researcher may be able to link the information given on a survey or during an interview to the particular research participant who gave it, this link will not be released to anyone else besides members of the research team. For example, a researcher who does face-to-face interviews will certainly know the identity of the respondent but promises to keep the responses in confidence.

Second, survey researchers should try to ensure that sensitive questions are asked in a nonjudgmental way. The researcher should minimize any sense of judgment and maximize the importance of accuracy. Careful attention should be paid to the wording of the introduction and the question to ensure that nothing negative about the behavior is implied to the respondent. The researcher needs to be very careful about any cues respondents are receiving about how their answers will be interpreted. These questions must be asked with great care and great empathy.

Third, the survey researcher should use a self-administered data collection procedure (discussed later in this chapter). It is generally agreed that having respondents answer questions in a self-administered form, on paper or directly into a computer, rather than having an interviewer ask the questions, will produce more honest answers. For surveys dealing with sensitive topics, a mail survey, Internet survey, or group administration survey should be considered. A face-to-face interview can also include some self-administered questions where a respondent is given a set of sensitive questions to answer in a booklet or directly into a computer. A similar strategy can be used with telephone surveys where answers to sensitive questions are entered directly into a computer using the touch-tone feature on the telephone.

Fourth, respondents feel more comfortable answering potentially sensitive questions when the responses are provided as categorical ranges rather than as a specific number. For example, a researcher may get a more honest answer if instead of asking, “What is your annual income?” the researcher provides the respondent with ranges of income from which to choose a response (e.g., less than $20,000, $20,000–$35,000). A respondent’s age can be collected with categorical ranges, instead of a specific age, as well. Especially with demographic characteristics, the more sensitive the question, the better it is to use response categories instead of specific numeric values.

Fifth, the survey researcher can use a randomized response technique (RRT), which allows the researcher to ask about illegal and sensitive behaviors and obtain accurate estimates of the frequency of the behavior. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you are interested in the frequency of excessive force used by correctional officers. You are conducting face-to-face interviews with a sample of correctional officers at a prison unit. Your interviewers define excessive force for each respondent. But instead of your interviewers asking correctional officers the question directly, they give each respondent a randomization device, such as a coin. They ask the respondent to flip the coin. They tell the respondent not to tell them the results of the coin toss. Then they instruct the respondent as follows: “Say Yes if either of the following is true: Your coin came up heads, or you have used excessive force against an inmate in the last month.”

If the respondent says yes, the interviewer does not know which question is being answered. Did the correctional officer say yes because the coin landed on heads or because the officer has used excessive force against an inmate in the last month? If this procedure was repeated with 100 respondents, based on probability theory, you would expect 50 out of 100 to say “Yes,” simply because their coin toss came up heads. Therefore, if you find that 68% of the respondents say “Yes” to this question, you estimate that the 18% above the expected 50% represents correctional officers who used excessive force against inmates in the past month. Thus your finding is that 18% of correctional officers use excessive force against inmates in any given month.

Sixth, although this will be discussed in a later section of this chapter, realize that researchers can use one of the reliability tests, such as split-half reliability, to detect untruthful responses. Researchers ask the same or similar questions in different sections of a survey to determine if respondents were truthful in their responses. Surveys in which the truthfulness of the respondent is questioned should be discarded from the study prior to analysis.

Are the Respondents Telling the Truth? Social Desirability People have a tendency to overreport something if it makes them look good (e.g., willingness to intervene in a crime to protect someone). Survey researchers call this overreporting social desirability bias. Social desirability bias occurs when respondents provide answers to survey questions that do not necessarily reflect the respondent’s beliefs but that reflect social norms. If social desirability bias is widespread, it can have a significant impact on the results of the study.

One of the best examples of social desirability bias is LaPiere’s 20 study of attitudes and behaviors towards hotel and restaurant service of Chinese people. Beginning in 1930 and continuing for two years thereafter, LaPiere traveled across the United States in an automobile with a young Chinese student and his wife. The early 1930s was a time when the general attitude of Americans toward Chinese residents was negative and was well documented in several social distance studies completed at the time. There was a national negative stereotype of Chinese citizens at the time, and the social norms of the time were to react negatively to individuals of Chinese descent. Discrimination against Chinese residents was common as well.

LaPiere discovered substantial differences between the stated attitude of survey respondents and actual behavior. During their extensive travels, the Chinese couple was received at 66 hotels, auto camps, and “tourist homes,” and was only refused service at one. Similarly, they were provided service in 184 restaurants and cafes throughout the United States and were never refused service. To assess differences between stated attitude and behavior, LaPiere completed a mailed survey six months after departure from 22 of the hotels and 43 of the restaurants they visited and asked “Will you accept members of the Chinese race as guests in your establishment?” To his bewilderment, 91% of the hotels and 93% of the restaurants answered “No,” even though he had a personal experience with each of the establishments where all but one provided service to the Chinese couple. Simply stated, he discovered what people say is not always what they do.

LaPiere’s study certainly illustrates the difference that occurs sometimes between stated attitudes on surveys and actual behaviors. Just because someone says they would or would not do something on a survey, does not necessarily mean that will relate to the respondents’ actions. In this case, LaPiere observed substantial discrepancies between attitudes and behaviors.

This study is also a reflection of social desirability bias. At the time, the social norms dictated a negative reaction to individuals of Chinese descent. When presented with a question about whether they would provide service to someone of Chinese descent, almost all of the respondents reflected the social norms at the time and responded “no.” As stated above, social desirability bias occurs when respondents provide answers to survey questions that do not necessarily reflect the respondent’s beliefs but instead reflect social norms, and that is certainly the case in LaPiere’s study.

In order to detect social desirability, some survey researchers include the same or similar questions in different sections of a survey to determine if respondents were truthful in their responses, as previously mentioned. Researchers can also build in questions that are likely to identify respondents who are giving socially desirable answers. For example, the researcher may ask survey questions that include words such as “always” and “never.” People rarely “always” or “never” do or feel something, so respondents who routinely select these responses are probably depicting social desirability bias. Another way to detect social desirability bias is to include unlikely choices in the closed-ended survey questions. Surveys in which the truthfulness of the respondent is questioned should be discarded from the study prior to analysis.

CLASSICS IN CJ RESEARCH

The Relationship Between Correctional Officers’ Race and their Attitudes

Research Study 21

Historically, correctional officers were white, uneducated, conservative males who lived in the rural areas where most prisons were located. Beginning in the 1950s, prison populations started to change as more urban blacks were sent to prison. Racial tensions between inmates and guards escalated. Black inmates had not only become more prevalent in number, they stood as a unified group against the guards who perceived them as a greater threat compared to the white inmates. Many reformers advocated increasing the number of black prison guards as a way to reduce conflict and antagonism between guards and inmates. The assumption was that black guards would be able to relate better to the black inmates because they shared similar backgrounds. Whether or not the attitudes held by black prison guards toward inmates were any different from those held by white guards remained an untested assumption until the late 1970s when James Jacobs and Lawrence Kraft conducted an empirical test of correctional officers’ attitudes.

The authors tested the following five hypotheses:

1. Black guards have more sympathetic attitudes toward inmates compared to white guards.

2. Black guards are more supportive of rehabilitation compared to white guards.

3. Black guards convey less support for their superiors compared to white guards.

4. Black guards are less committed to institutional goals compared to white guards.

5. Black guards are less committed to their occupations compared to white guards.

Is there a relationship between correctional officers’ race and their attitudes toward inmates, correctional goals, administrators, and correctional officer roles?

The authors administered a survey to a sample of 252 guards from Stateville and Joliet prisons who were attending in-service training. Both prisons were maximum-security facilities within seven miles of each other. Three-fourths of the inmate populations in both prisons were black, and most of the prisoners came from the Chicago area (the prisons were 35 miles southwest of the city). At the time the survey was administered, 12% of the correctional officers employed by the Illinois Department of Corrections were black and most of them were working at Stateville and Joliet.

The survey was administered to guards while they attended in-service training at the Correctional Academy between the summer of 1974 and fall of 1975; 165 white guards and 66 black guards completed the survey; 21 guards were excluded from the sample because they did not indicate their race and/or rank on the questionnaire. Prison guards were group-administered an anonymous survey and asked to respond to a series of questions that consisted of both closed-ended and open-ended questions.

Specifically, inmate orientation consisted of a 10-item measure, one question open-ended and the other nine closed-ended, which asked questions such as, “Inmates try to take advantage of officers whenever they can.” Job orientation consisted of a 7-item measure, which asked all closed-ended questions such as, “Although understanding may be important in helping inmates, what is really needed is strictness.” Staff orientation was a 3-item measure, all closed-ended questions such as, “When I began, the veterans were friendly and helped me learn.” System orientation was a 5-item measure, one question open-ended and the other four closed-ended, such as, “Why are there so many members of minority groups in prison?” Job commitment was a 9-item measure with all closed-ended questions such as, “Thinking ahead five years from now, do you think you will still be a correctional officer?”

The results of the study for each hypothesis are presented below.

1. Hypothesis: Black guards have more sympathetic attitudes toward inmates compared to white guards.

Study finding: Black prison guards did not express attitudes that were more sympathetic toward inmates compared to white guards. The responses of black guards to several questions actually revealed less sympathy. The hypothesis was rejected.

2. Hypothesis: Black guards are more supportive of rehabilitation compared to white guards.

Study finding: Black and white prison guards both indicated that rehabilitation was the primary purpose of prison, but when asked what the “primary purpose of prison should be,” more black guards than white guards chose punishment. The hypothesis was rejected.

3. Hypothesis: Black guards convey less support for their superiors compared to white guards.

Study finding: Black prison guards responded more favorably to their superiors than white guards even though most of the prison administrators and supervisors at the two prisons were white. The hypothesis was rejected.

4. Hypothesis: Black guards are less committed to institutional goals compared to white guards.

Study finding: Black officers do not support a more relaxed correctional process. The majority of both races disagreed with the statement that “correctional officers should be rough with inmates occasionally to let them know who is boss,” but blacks more often gave approval to the statement. The hypothesis was rejected.

5. Hypothesis: Black guards are less committed to their occupations compared to white guards.

Study finding: The responses of both black and white guards indicated a strong sense of institutional commitment. Two-thirds of the guards sampled responded that they planned to be working at the prison for at least the next five years. Many of the guards expressed a preference for their current occupation over other alternative options such as private security and police work. The hypothesis was rejected.

Overall, the conclusion was there were no consistent differences by race in guards’ attitudes toward prisoners, staff, correctional goals, or their occupation. According to the study authors, “There is nothing in these responses to suggest that black guards treat inmates with greater respect or sensitivity. They do not hold more rehabilitative views. Nor have they aligned themselves with the inmates against the administration.” 22

Jacobs and Kraft recognized one of the potential validity issues with their questions was social desirability. Guards’ responses may have been self-serving. Respondents may have provided “socially desirable” answers. The guards may have responded to the questions in terms of how they felt they should respond, not based on their own personal feelings. The extent that social desirability influenced the guards’ responses was not known. As discussed in this chapter, social desirability is a source of measurement error that threatens the validity of a researcher’s measures. Survey questions are valid only if they correctly assess the phenomenon under study; in this case, the guards’ attitudes toward prisoners, staff, correctional goals, and their occupation.

Another limitation of this study is that the sample of prison guards was not randomly selected. A non-probability sampling method was used to draw the sample. As discussed in Chapter 3, since a non-probability sampling method was used, in this case purposive sampling, the sample of prison guards selected for this study are likely not representative of a larger population. Jacobs and Kraft purposely chose prison guards from Joliet and Stateville prisons who were completing in-service training at the state’s Correctional Academy because most of the black prison guards in Illinois worked at these two prison facilities. However, since non-probability sampling was used, the sample may not even be representative of all prison guards in these two prison facilities and is even less likely to be representative of prison guards in Illinois or the United States. Therefore, the results may not be generalizable to these other populations.

Reliability issues may have arose with the wording of some of the survey questions as well. For example, in the inmate orientation scale, Jacobs and Kraft asked “in your opinion, when just considered as people, how similar are guards and prisoners?” The question was supposed to mean how similar is the prison guard answering the question to the inmates. Respondents may have understood the question differently with some respondents having answered in terms of other guards or most guards, not themselves personally. Therefore, it may be misleading to consider this item an indicator of perceived distance between self-as-guard and prisoners.

Jacobs and Kraft recommended that recruitment of minority guards was itself an important societal goal, because it expanded job opportunities in an area where minorities had been traditionally excluded. For this reason alone increasing the proportion of black guards is socially justifiable as well as legally compelled. The study discovered, though, that we should not unquestioningly accept the belief that this change in demographic composition of the work force will automatically have a major impact on the atmosphere of the prison.

Neither black nor white guards displayed attitudes that indicated they were more “inmate oriented.” The similarities suggested that the attitudes might have been formed as a result of their socialization into the prison environment. Just as police officers develop “working personalities” that influence their interactions with the public, guards display certain attitudes and behaviors toward inmates. Numerous studies published after Jacobs and Kraft have identified various organizational influences on guards’ attitudes.

The number of black correctional officers employed in prisons across the United States has increased in the years since Jacobs and Kraft published their study. Jacobs and Kraft were the first to explore the influence of race on correctional officer attitudes and, since then, numerous studies of correctional officers’ attitudes have been published. The debate over whether or not hiring more black correctional officers will ease racial tensions between officers and inmates continues due to contradictory research findings, but according to Jurik, 23 it would be unrealistic to expect significant improvements to the prison environment by simply hiring officers with particular demographic characteristics.

Increasing Validity: Using Scales and Indexes

Recall that validity addresses the accuracy of the measurement and refers to the extent to which the survey questions and responses measure what they are supposed to measure. One way of increasing the validity of your survey questions and responses is to ask multiple questions to measure the same concept, especially if the concept is complex. You do not need to ask five different questions to measure a respondent’s age. But, what about measuring parental attachment? You could have one question in your survey that asks, “What is your level of parental attachment?” but there are validity issues with asking just one question to measure a complex concept. As an alternative, you could ask the following 11 questions to measure parental attachment:

How often would you say that…

1. You get along well with your mother?

2. You feel that you can really trust your mother?

3. Your mother does not understand you?

4. Your mother is too demanding?

5. You really enjoy your mother?

6. You have a lot of respect for your mother?

7. Your mother interferes with your activities?

8. You think your mother is terrific?

9. You feel very angry toward your mother?

10. You feel violent toward your mother?

11. You feel proud of your mother?

The response categories for each question can be almost never, sometimes, most of the time, almost always.

Which is a better, more valid measure? Certainly, the measurement of parental attachment that asks 11 different questions is a higher quality measurement than just asking one question. In fact, the questions above were used by Bjerregaard and Smith 24 in their assessment of gender differences in gang participation. Their measurement of parental attachment is an adaptation of Hudson’s 25 Child ’ s Attitude Toward Mother (Father) Index , a well-standardized and validated index in the family assessment literature. By asking multiple questions to measure a complex concept, the researcher is able to even out response idiosyncrasies and improve the validity of the measurement.

Therefore, to measure a complex concept, researchers construct scales and indexes. These words are often used interchangeably in research methods, but they are actually different, so we will make some distinctions between the two. An index is a set of items that measure some underlying concept. Creating an index involves developing a set of items that, taken together, are indicators of the underlying concept you are attempting to measure. For example, every weekday the Dow Jones Industrial Index (DJJI) is reported on the nightly news. The DJII is a set of numerous stocks that are combined to create a single number. Rosenberg’s self-esteem measure, which was previously discussed, is an index. It uses 10 questions to measure the underlying concept of self-esteem. Similarly, the 11 parental attachment questions listed above form an index. The 11 items, taken together, are indicators of the underlying concept of parental attachment. So, when multiple questions are used to measure a complex concept, an index has been created.

What does a researcher do with the responses to the individual questions that make up the index? The researcher calculates an overall index score by summing the responses to all of the questions. The score serves as the indicator of your level of the concept being measured. Let’s use the parental attachment index as an example. Each of the 11 questions had four possible response categories: almost never, sometimes, most of the time, almost always. Almost never is coded as 1, sometimes is coded as 2, most of the time is coded as 3, and almost always is coded as 4. Each respondent’s answers to all questions are summed to get a single number that represents the respondent’s level of parental attachment. The scores range from 11 (i.e., answered each question as “almost never”) to 44 (i.e., answered each question as “almost always”) with a higher score representing a higher level of parental attachment. One respondent may have a score of 22 on the parental attachment index while another respondent may have a score of 37, the latter having a higher level of parental attachment than the former.

If you tried to do the scoring of the parental attachment index on your own, you may have run into a problem. Some of the questions are positive (e.g., you get along with your mother) and some are negative (e.g., your mother is too demanding). A response of “almost always” on the first question in the previous sentence demonstrates a high level of parental attachment, but a response of “almost always” on the second question in the previous sentence demonstrates a low level of parental attachment. How does a researcher deal with this issue? The answer is the researcher reverse codes the negative statements. Instead of using the 1-4 coding scheme discussed in the last paragraph, the researcher reverses the code for the negative items. In this case, almost never is coded as 4, sometimes is coded as 3, most of the time is coded as 2, and almost always is coded as 1. Therefore, when a respondent answers “almost never” to the “your mother is too demanding” question, the answer is coded as a 4, which demonstrates a high level of parental attachment.

A scale is a set of questions that are ordered in some sequence. The researcher is seeking a pattern from the respondent’s answers to the set of questions, rather than a simple summation of the individual question responses, as happens with indexes. For example, Guttman scales are used by survey researchers and are ordered in such a way that agreement with a particular item indicates agreement with all the items that come earlier in the ordered set of statements. Consider the following Guttman Scale regarding immigration.

Place a check next to each statement you agree with

—— I would be comfortable with the United States expanding immigration.

—— I would be comfortable with new immigrants moving into my city.

—— I would be comfortable with new immigrants moving onto my block.

—— I would be comfortable with new immigrants moving next door to me.

—— I would be comfortable with a new immigrant dating my child.

—— I would be comfortable with a new immigrant marrying my child.

The items are ordered so that agreement with the fourth item would also indicate a strong likelihood of agreement with the first three statements. If the respondent is not comfortable with new immigrants moving into his city, then he is definitely not going to be comfortable with new immigrants moving next door.

You have probably also heard someone say “On a scale of 1 to 10 …” For example, it is common for health care providers to ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10. You have probably also heard someone mention the term Likert scale. Scales are used to measure the intensity of your response. Just like the pain scale measuring the intensity of your pain, a Likert scale measures the intensity of your response. A Likert scale measures the intensity of your preference or opinion and is typically measured on a five-point scale, such as “strongly agree,” “agree,” “neither agree nor disagree,” “disagree,” and “strongly disagree.” Responses to several questions using a Likert scale are often combined to form an index. Now, you probably understand why the words “index” and “scale” are used interchangeably by many people. The word “scale” is used more frequently than “index.” Although there are differences between the two terms, the key is to understand how scales and indexes are used in criminal justice and criminology research rather than worrying about whether the research study you are reviewing used a scale or an index. Also, remember that complex concepts should be measured by numerous questions.

Assessing Reliability

In our everyday lives, we use the terms reliable and unreliable to describe our cars, friends, and technology, among others. If your car starts every time you are ready to leave, then it is reliable. If your friend never helps you when you request assistance, then he or she is considered unreliable. If your cell phone routinely drops calls, then it is unreliable. Basically, reliable, as it has been used in these examples, involves consistency. For example, does your car consistently start? As another example, if you measure your weight on your bathroom scale five times in a row and receive the same result, then the scale is a reliable measure of weight. The scale has consistently measured your weight. Stepping on your bathroom scale three times in a row and getting readings of 108, 212, and 157 pounds is inconsistent, unreliable, and as a result, not very useful.

We also use the term to describe items in criminal justice as previously mentioned. For example, if a police radar gun is used to measure the speed of two vehicles going the same speed and the same results are obtained, then the radar gun is reliable. Similarly, if a breathalyzer is administered to two individuals with the same blood alcohol level and the breathalyzer gets the same results each time, then the breathalyzer is reliable. In these cases, the radar gun is a reliable measure of the speed of automobiles, and the breathalyzer is a reliable measure of blood alcohol content (i.e., level of intoxication).

Researchers use the term in roughly the same way to describe the measures they use in their research. Reliability, from a research standpoint, addresses the consistency of a measurement. It refers to whether or not you get the same result if you use an instrument to measure something more than once. It is the researcher’s expectation that there will not be different results each time the measure is used, assuming that nothing has changed in what is being measured. When a researcher obtains different results on different measurements, then there is random error in the measurement process and the results must be evaluated with caution.

Just as with validity, there are some common ways for researchers to assess the reliability of their measures, but the assessment used depends on which aspect of reliability they are interested in. There are three different aspects of reliability that are of interest to criminal justice researchers: 1) reliability over time; 2) reliability over raters or observers; and, 3) reliability over items. The survey researcher could administer the same survey to the same respondents twice to assess consistency. This is known as test-retest reliability and is used when the researcher is interested in reliability over time. The survey researcher could have two different persons gather observations and assess the consistency between the two. This is known as interrater reliability and is used when the researcher is interested in reliability over raters or observers. Frequently, researchers assess reliability of their measures by dividing the survey into two halves and comparing the results of each half. This is known as split-half reliability and is used when the researcher is interested in reliability over items. Each of the three common ways to assess the reliability of a survey instrument is discussed in the next sections.

Test-Retest Reliability—Reliability over Time If a researcher is interested in the reliability of a survey instrument over time, she can use test-retest reliability. Utilizing test-retest reliability, a measurement is reliable over time if the same measurement is repeated using the same subjects and yields the same results. Let’s use the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as an example. If we administer the SAT to 100 high school seniors tomorrow and then administered the SAT to the same 100 seniors two days later, we would expect each student to get similar results on each test (assuming learning did not take place from the first administration to the second). If the results are quite similar, then the SAT is highly reliable; if not, then the SAT is unreliable. To assess the level of reliability of a measurement using test-retest reliability, the researcher must use the same measurement on the same subjects. If the researcher gets the same results each time, then the measurement is highly reliable and a quality measure. If the researcher gets different results each time, then the measurement has low reliability.

Since it is common for surveys to be used in cross-sectional designs (see Chapter 5), and thus, the sample only surveyed once, test-retest reliability is used infrequently to assess the reliability of a survey. However, the process is fairly easy to complete because all the researcher needs to do is give the same survey to the same subjects within a short period of time. For example, if a researcher wanted to determine the reliability of her fear of crime survey on your campus, she could administer the survey to a classroom of students on Tuesday and the same students on Thursday. If the results for each respondent are the same, then the fear of crime survey has high reliability. If the results are substantially different, then the fear of crime survey has low reliability unless something substantial has occurred on campus (e.g., a robbery and sexual assault) or in the news that can explain the substantial differences over a two-day period.

Interrater Reliability—Reliability over Raters A measurement is reliable if someone else using the same measurement in the same situation produces almost identical results. Furthermore, a measurement is reliable if the same results are obtained time after time, even when the measurement is used by different people. Consider a blood pressure cuff. If five nurses take your blood pressure within the span of a few minutes using the same blood pressure cuff and each nurse gets the same results, then the blood pressure cuff is reliable (i.e., consistent results across different raters). The raters in this example are the nurses. The five nurses arrived at the same result, so the measurement tool (i.e., blood pressure cuff) is reliable.

Interrater reliability is particularly challenging in field research (see Chapter 6) and content analysis (see Chapter 7) where there has to be substantial agreement among those who are reading and coding the documents in content analysis or observing the behavior in field research. As it applies to surveys, interrater reliability is assessed in telephone and face-to-face interviews where the interaction between the respondent and the interviewer (i.e., rater) can influence responses. In addition, when open-ended questions are used, regardless of how the survey is administered, it becomes important that the data collected are interpreted in consistent ways. If the individuals coding the data consistently agree, then interrater reliability is high.

Split-Half Reliability—Reliability over Items A popular way of determining the reliability of a survey measurement is to assess the internal consistency of the measure. This assessment is done on indexes (i.e., when a set of survey items are developed to measure some underlying concept) by comparing answers by a respondent. A measurement is reliable over items when the items contained in the index consistently measure the underlying concept. Consider the 11-question parental attachment index, previously discussed, used by Bjerregaard and Smith. 26 Each of the 11 questions was designed to measure parental attachment. Low scores indicated low parental attachment and high scores indicated high parental attachment. How does a researcher determine the reliability, or what is sometimes referred to as the internal consistency, of the survey items?

Utilizing the split-half reliability technique, the researcher would split the items in half. This is accomplished by either selecting the responses to the first five questions and placing them in one group and placing the next five in another, or the odd-numbered questions and responses in one group and the even-numbered ones in another, or randomly selecting two sets of five. The researcher then compares the scores of the two halves on parental attachment for each respondent. If five of the items for a respondent indicate low parental attachment, then the other five should be consistent and also show low parental attachment. If the two halves correspond with one another over and over, then the index developed to measure parental attachment is a reliable one.

A statistic called Cronbach ’ s alpha is often used to assess the internal consistency/reliability of an index. The closer Cronbach’s alpha is to 1.0, the more reliable it is. The internal consistency coefficient should be at least +.60 and preferably above +.70. In an article by Bjerregaard and Smith, the authors stated, “The reliability coefficient for this scale is 0.86” 27 so the measure of parental attachment was reliable. As a consumer of research you should look for an internal consistency coefficient if the researcher uses an index. Most likely what you will see is Cronbach’s alpha, which above +.70 demonstrates a reliable measure.

Increasing Reliability

One goal of a good measure is to increase question reliability. In this section, specific ways that researchers can improve the reliability of survey questions and responses will be discussed. The focus of this section is to make you an informed consumer of research regarding reliability, not describe all the nuances of question design so you can build your own survey.

Increasing Reliability: Ensuring Consistent Meaning for All Respondents One step toward increasing reliability is to make sure each respondent in a sample is asked the same set of questions. But increasing reliability is not as simple as making sure each survey respondent is asked the same questions. Each question should mean the same thing to all respondents so each respondent interprets what is being asked in the same way. Ensuring consistent meaning for all respondents leads to consistent responses to the survey questions, thus increasing reliability. If two respondents understand the question to mean different things, their answers may be different for that reason alone, which can negatively impact the results of the study. To the extent that there is inconsistency across respondents, error is introduced, and the measurement is less reliable.

One potential problem you need to assess is whether the survey includes words that are universally understood. When surveys are done on the general population, a researcher needs to remember that those sampled will have a wide range of educational and cultural backgrounds. The researcher needs to be careful in wording the questions so they are easily understood by all participants. Also, when conducting research on a criminal justice topic, the researcher needs to be careful to not use jargon and acronyms that are used in the criminal justice system. In addition, the survey researcher needs to be sure to adequately define and describe any terms that may be uncommonly used in the general population and those terms that are sometimes used incorrectly in the general population. For example, although some have a general understanding of what activities comprise certain types of crime, it is a good idea to define each crime included in a survey. It is common for people to use burglary and robbery interchangeably, but from a survey standpoint, the researcher needs to make sure that it is clear to the respondent what activity constitutes burglary and what activity constitutes robbery by defining each crime.

Besides being sure to define any unfamiliar words used in a survey, the researcher needs to be cautious when using terms or concepts that can have multiple meanings. For example, the term “recidivism” holds multiple meanings in criminal justice research. For example, recidivism is the continuation of criminal activity, but it is measured various ways in criminal justice research. In a self-report survey, recidivism can mean any subsequent criminal activity regardless of whether the offense was reported to the police or the perpetrator was arrested. Also, if a sex offender commits a theft, is he a recidivist? The answer to this question depends on how you define recidivism. Some researchers require the subsequent offense to be as serious or more serious than the original offense to be included as recidivism. Some researchers only consider reincarceration as recidivism, while others expand it to include reconvictions, and some expand it even further by including all subsequent arrests as recidivism. Since there is so much variation in how recidivism is defined and measured, a survey researcher needs to make sure the definition of recidivism is clear in the survey so all respondents will interpret the term in the same way.

What is the reliability issue with the following survey question: Do you favor or oppose gun control legislation? The problem is that respondents will interpret the term “gun control legislation” differently, so the question will not mean the same thing to all respondents. The term “gun control legislation” encompasses many legislative strategies to control guns and there is no way of knowing which strategy the respondents are thinking about while answering the question. Gun control legislation can mean banning the legal sale of certain kinds of guns such as automatic weapons, requiring people to register their guns, limiting the number of guns that people may own, limiting which people may possess guns, or implementing a waiting period before the purchase of a gun, among others. The problem is when a respondent says “yes” they favor gun control legislation, the researcher has no way of knowing which strategy is supported by the respondent. The responses cannot be interpreted without assuming what respondents think the question means. Respondents will undoubtedly interpret this question differently. As written, the question is unreliable because it does not mean the same thing to all respondents. The solution to this problem is fairly simple. The researcher should ask a separate survey question for each gun control strategy she is interested in studying. These separate specific questions will be reliable because they will be consistently understood by all respondents and interpreted by researchers. For example, one of the survey questions can be “Do you favor legislation that limits the number of guns a person may own?” This is a reliable question that will be consistently understood by all respondents.

Increasing Reliability: Additional Question Characteristics In addition to ensuring that the question means the same thing to every respondent, there are three additional characteristics of a reliable question that you should be familiar with as you assess research articles. First, in order to be a reliable question, the researcher’s side of the question and answer process is entirely scripted so that the questions, as written, fully prepare a respondent to answer questions. In face-to-face and telephone interviews, it is important to give interviewers a script so that they can read the questions exactly as worded. Second, the kinds of answers that constitute an appropriate response to the question are communicated consistently to all respondents. The respondents should have the same perception of what constitutes an adequate answer to the question The simplest way to give respondents the same perceptions of what constitutes an adequate answer is to provide them with a list of acceptable answers by using closed-ended questions. With closed-ended questions, the respondent has to choose one of a set of appropriate responses provided by the researcher. Third, a survey question should ask only one question, not two or more. For example, a researcher should not ask the question, “Do you want to graduate from college and become a police officer?” A respondent could want to do one but not the other. When asked two questions at once, respondents will have to decide which to answer, and the survey researcher will have to assume what the respondent’s answer means.

Survey Distribution Methods

A survey researcher must decide how to distribute the survey to the sample. Until the 1970s, most academic and government surveys were completed through face-to-face interviews. 28 When telephone ownership became nearly universal in the United States, telephone interviewing became a common mechanism to distribute surveys. 29 The newest means of survey distribution is through the Internet. There are five main mechanisms to distribute a survey: mail, group-administered, Internet, face-to-face, and telephone. Each survey distribution method will be discussed in this section. The strengths and weaknesses of each distribution method will also be discussed. Survey researchers need to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each method of distribution as they decide which distribution methods works best for their research questions and survey.

Self-Administered Surveys

Self-administered surveys involve the distribution of surveys for respondents to complete on their own. Self-administered surveys include those distributed by mail, group-administered surveys, and surveys distributed via the Internet. Self-administered surveys involve minimal (i.e., group-administered) or no personal contact (i.e., mail and Internet surveys) between the researcher and the respondent. With self-administered surveys, surveys can be mailed to the sample, distributed to a large group of people in one location, or can be sent through e-mail or placed on the Internet. One of the main advantages of self-administered surveys is that the collection of sensitive, stigmatizing, and embarrassing information is more likely to be valid, as previously discussed, since respondents do not have to share their responses directly with an interviewer. However, one of the main disadvantages is that there may be a discrepancy between what people report they do and what they actually do, as previously discussed when the topic of social desirability was addressed. A survey researcher must weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each type of self-administered survey when determining the best method of distribution for their survey.

Mailed Surveys Since only a valid mailing address is required, a common method to distribute surveys is to mail the survey to the sample.

The major strengths of mail surveys are listed below.

1. Mail surveys are fairly inexpensive to complete. Since there are no interviewers to pay, the costs of a mail survey are typically much lower than a face-to-face or a telephone interview. The main cost is the printing and mailing of the surveys and the return postage for the survey responses. In addition, mail surveys can be accomplished with minimal staff and office space.

2. Mail surveys can be easily distributed to a geographically dispersed sample.

3. Mail surveys provide respondents ample time to give thoughtful answers and even to refer to other documents that may be needed to answer the survey questions.

The major weaknesses of mail surveys are listed below.

1. Mail surveys typically have lower response rates than other methods of survey distribution.

2. Mail surveys require complete and easy-to-understand instructions since there is no personal interaction between the survey researcher and the respondent. If the instructions are unclear or the survey questions are confusing to the sample, the researcher will face significant reliability issues, which will impact the results of the study as previously discussed.

3. With mail surveys, the researcher has no control over who actually completes the survey. The survey researcher may restrict the survey to only adults between the ages of 18 and 35, but that does not necessarily reflect who actually answered the survey.

Survey Shows More Teens Using Synthetic Drugs 30

Nearly one in nine high school seniors have gotten high in the past year on synthetic drugs, such as K2 or Spice, second only to the number of teens who have used marijuana, according to the Monitoring the Future survey. The survey, conducted annually by the University of Michigan, questions 47,000 students in the 8th, 10th, and 12th grades in 400 public and private schools throughout the United States. The survey is group-administered to students in their normal classrooms. It is sponsored by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health.

Monitoring the Future, the nation’s most comprehensive survey of teenage drug use, found 11.4% of the high school seniors have used the synthetic substances, often packaged as potpourri or herbal incense and sold in convenience stores, which mimic the effects of marijuana. K2 and Spice emerged as a problem in 2008, and their popularity appears to be rising. People who smoke the chemical-coated herbs may experience euphoria, but bad reactions are common, including convulsions, anxiety attacks, dangerously elevated heart rates, vomiting, and suicidal thoughts. Most teens who smoke Spice or K2 report using other illicit drugs.

Marijuana remains the most popular drug among teens. Marijuana use increased for the fourth year in a row after a decade of decline. Nearly 7% of high school seniors report smoking marijuana daily, which is the highest rate seen in 30 years. In addition, half of high school seniors reported having tried an illicit drug at some time, 40% reported using one or more drugs in the past year, and a quarter said they had used one or more drugs in the past month, the survey found. Tobacco and alcohol use are at their lowest levels since the survey began in 1975.

Group-Administered Surveys Surveys can be distributed to individuals who have gathered together in a group. In fact, you have probably participated in a group-administered survey in one of your college classes. It is common for surveys to be administered to students in college and high school classrooms as well as to professionals in the criminal justice system who have gathered for in-service training or conference participation. The researcher will address the group regarding the purpose of the survey and to request participation. The researcher will then hand out the survey to each member of the group. The survey participants will typically complete the survey at the time of distribution and immediately return it to the researcher.

The major strengths of group-administered surveys are listed below.

1. Response rates are typically very high.

2. Since the researcher is at least present, he has the opportunity to explain the study and answer questions respondents may have about the survey.

3. Generally, group-administered surveys are inexpensive to complete since numerous surveys can be completed and returned at one time.

The major weakness of group-administered surveys is that it only applies to the small number of participants than can be easily gathered as a group. It is practically impossible to have a random sample of community residents gather to take a survey. However, some groups of people naturally congregate (e.g., students and prisoners), making group-administered surveys a viable means of survey distribution for some populations.

Internet and E-mail Surveys A recent development in survey distribution is to send an e-mail invitation to the sample. The selected subjects are then asked to answer questions by replying to a survey that is included in the e-mail or they are provided a link to a website where the survey can be completed online. Several commercial companies (e.g., Survey Monkey) make the process of creating, distributing, and collecting and coding data from an Internet survey easy and affordable. Although Internet and e-mail surveys are fairly new, the process and challenges mirror those for mail surveys.

The major strengths of Internet and e-mail surveys are listed below.

1. Internet and e-mail surveys are inexpensive to complete. The researcher does not even incur the printing, postage, and data entry costs associated with a mail survey.

2. The data from Internet and e-mail surveys can be collected quickly. An e-mail survey can be distributed instantaneously to hundreds of email addresses and since the survey is answered online, there is no delay in the researcher obtaining the completed survey. Once the respondent hits “submit” or “send” the researcher obtains the completed survey immediately.

The major weaknesses of Internet and e-mail surveys are listed below.

1. Internet and e-mail surveys are limited to individuals with e-mail addresses and Internet access. There are variations in computer ownership and use by race, ethnicity, age, income, and education, which can significantly impact the generalizability of results.

2. Depending on the sampled group and the topic, response rates to Internet and e-mail surveys are frequently low. A significant problem with Internet and e-mail surveys is inducing people to respond to the survey since there is no personal interaction between the researcher and potential respondent.

Personal Interviews

Surveys are often conducted by interviewers who read the survey items to respondents and record their responses in a face-to-face or telephone interview. A persistent issue with interviews involves the reliability (i.e., consistency) of the responses. Since there is a personal interaction between the interviewer and the respondent, the interviewer may influence the responses provided to the questions, which impacts the interrater reliability of the study. Different interviewers obtain somewhat different answers to the same questions. The interviewer’s style and personal characteristics (such as gender, race, and age) can impact the answers provided by respondents. Also, since the survey questions are read to the respondent, the interviewer’s tone and body language can lead to a different meaning to the question for different respondents. As discussed in the reliability section of this chapter, it is critical to the reliability of survey questions and responses that the questions mean the same thing to all respondents. The way certain questions are phrased by different interviewers can impact the responses given, thus impacting the reliability of the study. It is critical that interviewers are trained prior to data collection and monitored throughout the interview process so inconsistencies between interviewers can be minimized.

Face-to-Face Interviews Face-to-face interviews are typically completed in the respondent’s residence. Recall from the opening case study that the initial interview of the National Crime Victimization Survey is completed face-to-face.

The major strengths of face-to-face interviews are listed below.

1. Surveys which utilize face-to-face interviews typically have high response rates.

2. Lengthy surveys can be completed through face-to-face interviews. Although it is not always the case, some face-to-face interviews take more than one hour to complete.

3. The interviewer can answer any questions the respondent may have and can probe for additional information when an inadequate or incomplete answer is provided.

The major weaknesses of face-to-face interviews are listed below.

1. Due to the cost of interview staff and perhaps travel to the interview locations, face-to-face interviews are typically the most expensive survey distribution method.

2. The amount of time it takes to complete all the face-to-face interviews means that the data collection period is usually longer than other methods of survey distribution.

Telephone Interviews Telephone interviews are usually completed through the use of a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system. With CATI, the interviewer reads the question from a computer screen and then enters the respondent’s answer directly into the CATI software so it is readily available for analysis. The CATI system then automatically shows the next ques tion on the computer screen. This process increases the speed with which interviews are completed and reduces interviewers’ errors. Telephone interviews are less expensive, less time consuming, and less subject to the reliability threats that can occur when conducting face-to-face interviews.

The major strengths of telephone interviews are listed below.

1. The telephone interviewing process can be completed very quickly. A staff of 15 interviewers can complete over 1,000 telephone interviews in a few days.

2. Through the use of random digit dialing (RDD), probability sampling can be utilized in telephone interviews. RDD is used because a large percentage of household telephone numbers are not listed in the current telephone book, either because they are new or at the request of the customer. RDD offers each telephone number an equal probability of being selected, which is required in probability sampling, by randomly generating the last four digits of each telephone number selected in the sample.

The major weaknesses of telephone interviews are listed below.

1. Even though RDD is used, there are sampling limitations with telephone surveys because many people do not have landline telephones. According to the 2011 National Health Interview Survey, 36.8% of the respondents did not have a working landline telephone in their home, up from 20% in 2008. 31 Furthermore, 31% of the respondents stated they receive all or almost all of their calls on cell phones. 32 People without landline phones and those who only use cell phones are generally excluded from RDD sampling. This limits the generalizability of findings generated from RDD samples.

2. In addition to the rise of cell phone use, telephone survey response rates suffer from the increased use of caller ID, which has decreased the rate at which people answer their landline telephones. Also, because many telephone calls are for sales and fundraising purposes, some people react negatively to calls from strangers, which further reduces the response rates for telephone surveys. 33

Which Method of Survey Distribution Should a Researcher Use?

It would be much easier if we just said that there is one preferred method of survey distribution, but the reality is that a survey researcher needs to consider his research questions, survey structure, population under study, and the strengths and weaknesses of each method of distribution in deciding which is best for his research project. For example, when the researcher has a limited budget, one of the self-administered techniques (i.e., mail, group-administered, Internet, and e-mail surveys) is preferable. Numerous Ph.D. dissertations in criminal justice and criminology have utilized self-administered surveys because of their low cost. However, self-administered surveys are not a good option if the researcher is concerned about the reading and writing capabilities of the sample members. Furthermore, self-administered surveys are not a good option when the survey consists of several open-ended questions. Personal interviews are more appropriate for several open-ended questions while self-administered surveys should include almost exclusively closed-ended questions. There is no simple answer to the stated question at the start of this section. The researcher needs to consider the research question and survey and then needs to maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the chosen survey distribution method.

Chapter Summary

This chapter began with a brief overview of the three main components of survey research (i.e., sampling, question design, and methods of survey distribution) followed by a discussion of nonresponse and its impact on survey results. Comprehensive discussions of validity and reliability followed. The four ways of assessing the validity of survey questions and responses were illustrated, including face validity, content validity, criterion-related validity, and construct validity. Preferred mechanisms to increase the validity of embarrassing and stigmatizing questions as well as to control for social desirability bias were explained. For reliability, the three main mechanisms to assess reliability (i.e., test-retest reliability, interrater reliability, and split-half reliability) were presented as well as mechanisms to increase reliability such as ensuring consistent question meaning for all respondents. Finally, the methods of survey distribution were presented along with the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Critical Thinking Questions

1. What are the three categories of nonrespondents, and how does nonresponse impact survey results?

2. What are the main ways to assess validity, and what strategies exist to increase the validity of survey questions and responses?

3. What are the main ways to assess reliability, and what strategies exist to increase the reliability of survey questions and responses?

4. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each survey distribution method?

construct validity: Assesses the extent to which a particular measure relates to other measures consistent with theoretically derived hypotheses concerning the concepts/variables that are being measured

content validity: When the survey questions measure the full breadth and depth of the concept being studied

criterion-related validity: An assessment to determine the strength of the relationship between the responses to the survey and another measurement, the criterion, to which it should be related if the measurement is valid

Cronbach ’ s alpha: A statistic used to assess the internal consistency/reliability of an index

face validity: An assessment of the survey questions to see if on “face value” the questions seem to be measuring the concepts and variables they are supposed to be measuring

index: A set of items that measure some underlying concept

interrater reliability: A ratio established to determine the agreement among multiple raters

reliability: Addresses the consistency of a measurement and refers to whether or not a researcher gets the same results if the same instrument is used to measure something more than once

response rate: The number of people who respond to a survey divided by the number of people sampled

scale: A set of questions that are ordered in some sequence

self-administered surveys: The distribution of surveys for respondents to complete on their own; includes surveys distributed by mail, group-administered surveys, and surveys distributed via the Internet

social desirability bias: When respondents provide answers to survey questions that do not necessarily reflect the respondent’s beliefs but instead reflect social norms

split-half reliability: An assessment of reliability in which the correspondence between two halves of a measurement is determined

telescoping: When a respondent brings behaviors and actions that occurred outside the recall period into the recall period

test-retest reliability: An assessment of reliability in which a measurement is reliable over time if the same measurement is repeated using the same subjects and yields the same results

validity: Addresses the accuracy of the measurement and refers to the extent to which researchers measure what they planned to measure

1 Truman, Jennifer L. (September 2011). Criminal victimization, 2010. Washington D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

2 Fowler, Floyd J., Jr. (2009). Survey research methods, 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

7 Truman, September 2011.

8 Fowler, 2009.

9 Earl Babbie. (2013). The practice of social research, 13th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

10 Wilsnack, R. “Explaining collective violence in prisons: Problems and possibilities.” 61–78 in Cohen, A., G. Cole, and R. Bailey. (1976). Prison violence. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. This study was excerpted from Amy B. Thistlethwaite and John D. Wooldredge. (2010). Forty studies that changed criminal justice: Explorations into the history of criminal justice research. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

11 Sykes, G. (1958). The society of captives: A study of a maximum security prison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

12 Henderson, J., W. Rauch, and R. Phillips. (1987). Guidelines for developing a security program, 2nd ed. Washington D.C.: National Institute of Corrections, NIC Accession Number 006045.

13 Useem, B., and A. Piehl. (2006). “Prison buildup and disorder.” Punishment and Society 8, 87–115.

14 Fowler, 2009.

15 Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

16 ICPSR can be accessed at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu /icpsrweb/ICPSR/

17 Maltais, Michelle. (July 9, 2012). “Want a job? Check the spelling on your Facebook profile.” Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-social-recruiting-jobs-20120709,0,2693929.story . Retrieved on July 10, 2012.

18 Fowler, 2009.

20 LaPiere, Richard T. (1934). “Attitudes vs. actions.” Social Forces 13, 230–237.

21 Jacobs, J., and L. Kraft. (1978). “Integrating the keepers: A comparison of black and white prison guards in Illinois.” Social Problems 23, 304–318. This study was excerpted from Amy B. Thistlethwaite and John D. Wooldredge. (2010). Forty studies that changed criminal justice: Explorations into the history of criminal justice research. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

22 Jacobs and Kraft, p. 317.

23 Jurik, N. (1985). “An officer and a lady: Organizational barriers to women working as correctional officers in men’s prisons.” Social Problems 32, 375–388.

24 Bjerregaard, Beth, and Carolyn Smith. (1993). “Gender differences in gang participation, delinquency, and substance use. Journal of Quantitative Criminology 9, 329–355.

25 Hudson, W. (1982). The clinical measurement package: A field manual. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press.

26 Bjerregaard and Smith, 1993.

27 Bjerregaard and Smith, 1993, p. 339.

28 Fowler, 2009.

30 Leger, Donna Leinwand. (December 14, 2011). “Survey: More teens using synthetic drugs.” USA Today . http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011–12–14/more-teens-using-synthetic-drugs/51900736/1. Retrieved on June 15, 2012.

31 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/quest_data_related_1997_ forward.htm. Retrieved on July 12, 2012.

33 Fowler, 2009.

Applied Research Methods in Criminal Justice and Criminology by University of North Texas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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7 Mixed Methods, Ethnography, and Criminology/Criminal Justice Research

Nigel G. Fielding is Emeritus Professor and Founding Chair of Criminology at the University of Surrey.

• Published: 08 December 2021
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This chapter provides an overview of the historical dimensions of ethnographies using mixed-methods approaches, supported by examples from selected landmark works within this tradition. It presents the epistemological assumptions about knowledge production, positionality, and the types of questions typically asked by a criminologist using mixed methods and makes clear how they differ from ethnographies using other approaches and traditions. The chapter considers what ethnographies using a mixed-methods approach can produce that other approaches may not be able to. It then details how ethnographies using mixed methods can contribute to policy development, framing this against the perspectives and needs of policymakers. The chapter concludes by assessing the potential future contribution of ethnographically grounded mixed-methods research to crime and criminal justice issues.

This chapter provides readers with an overview of criminological ethnographies that use mixed methods. Readers will:

Become familiar with the epistemological assumptions that such ethnographies make.

Explore four classic exemplars of criminological ethnographies that use mixed methods.

Learn how mixed methods that include ethnographic methods in their research design offer enhanced reliability, validity, and generalizability of research findings.

Learn how such research designs can also lend “analytic density” to a study.

Examine the place of mixed-methods research in the development and evaluation of contemporary criminal justice policy.

Take a look forward to the future uses of ethnographically-grounded mixed-methods in research on crime issues.

Mixed methods are currently in vogue among methodologists and the social research community more generally. Unlike innovative methodological approaches that find a niche usership and specialized substantive applications, their uptake is apparent across a wide range of disciplines, with mixed-method research designs featuring in empirical studies across all the main substantive topics with which social science engages (see Ivankova and Kawamura 2010 ). What is sometimes described as a “Mixed-Methods Movement” has a well-established conference series, its own professional association with regional branches worldwide, and its own journals. As well as their vogue among social researchers, proponents of mixed-method approaches are prominent in the policy community and among those who commission and fund social research ( Fielding 2010 ).

The vogue for mixed methods is, nevertheless, somewhat of a curiosity. Mixed methods have been used for many decades, and what is sometimes treated as a radical new discovery by authors keen to promote a bandwagon is actually a practice with long historical roots. Indeed, the fundamental epistemological premises on which mixed-methods research designs are based inform a range of disciplines right across the natural sciences. So the vogue would better be regarded as a rediscovery. In the modern era, it was the psychologist Donald Campbell whose classic publications championed mixed methods in the late 1950s and into the 1970s, but long before that eminent sociologists usually associated with the quantitative tradition, such as Paul Lazersfeld, were actually adept practitioners of mixed methods. Lazersfeld, Jahoda, and Zeisl’s landmark study of the relationship between long-term unemployment and mental illness mixed a vast range of data sources and multiple methods in a case study of the Austrian village of Marienthal, first published in 1933 ( Fryer 1992 ).

Closer to the concerns of the present volume, mixed methods have a substantial lineage in the study of crime and criminal justice and of social deviance more generally. They have also often included ethnographic methods among the methods being combined. Although there is no logical or epistemological reason that a study mixing two or more qualitative (or two or more quantitative) methods cannot be regarded as a mixed-methods study ( Fielding and Fielding 1986 ), mixed methods are generally seen as involving the combination of at least one qualitative and at least one quantitative method. Indeed, authorities such as Creswell (2009) regard this as definitional. Nevertheless, some of the best-known criminological research combines two or more qualitative methods. There is no lack of affinity between the mixed-methods community and qualitative methods. One should not of course elide “qualitative” with “ethnographic”—there are many qualitative methods and studies that are not ethnographic—but ethnographies in the strict sense, and ethnographic methods in the looser sense, are prominent in mixed methods. Similarly, ethnographies often mix methods and we might indeed regard this as inescapable, if not definitional. It would be hard to conduct an ethnography without asking people questions during fieldwork, and even when field observation is the primary method, the moment we ask research subjects questions and document their answers we are interviewing, albeit informally.

This chapter provides an overview of the historical dimensions of ethnographies using mixed-methods approaches, via a quartet of classic criminological studies. Profiling these studies will help us identify the epistemological assumptions that guided the research and to connect these with the assumptions that lie behind the mixed-method approach. Where criminological researchers ask questions about the wider extent of a social phenomenon observed in fieldwork—its reliability, validity, and generalizability—they enter a domain where mixed methods can answer such questions more effectively than a single method on its own. This is not the only affordance of mixed methods, and although it was the preoccupation of classic statements of the mixed-methods approach such as Campbell and Fiske (1959) , the pursuit of generalizability now sits alongside the search for “analytic density” ( Fielding 2009 ) in the contemporary practice of mixed-methods research. However, it would be fair to say that the generalizability objective is of more interest to those who commission and consume research in aid of policy development. Having addressed the epistemological premises of mixed methods in the context of ethnographies of crime and criminal justice, the chapter will profile the current place of mixed methods in research aimed at the development and evaluation of criminal justice policy, before closing with some thoughts on where ethnographically grounded mixed methods might most usefully be applied to crime issues in the coming years.

Historical Examples

This section profiles four classic studies in criminology and the sociology of deviance that are commonly regarded as ethnographic in approach. The studies cover a long historical span but have been chosen because they have contributed to the core curriculum of their particular topical field. Moreover, they each demonstrate the affordances of a distinctive choice of methods to combine. It is moot whether the researchers who conducted these studies regarded themselves as using mixed methods, because what matters is how they conducted their fieldwork and performed their data analysis. If the underlying principles are those that inform what we now label as a distinct research practice of mixed methods, then in functional terms these were mixed-methods studies.

The first study we will consider is The Jack-roller—A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story ( Shaw 1930 ). A Jack Roller’s modus operandi was to loiter on “skid row” (urban areas frequented by chronic alcoholics) and attack drunks, stealing their valuables. The study receives mention in numerous textbooks right up to the present, and is often treated as initiating the systematic study of delinquent etiology, the causal analysis of what motivates involvement in delinquency and crime with a view to informing social interventions aimed at desistance. It also had considerable topical currency among the informed public and the policy community of the time, and the book remains in print to this day. Shaw’s study combined the life history interview method with basic methods of spatial analysis. The principal problem of the study is that its main method—a detailed autobiography of one individual’s deviant career history, accompanied by an in-depth analysis of that career pursuing motivation and choice—clearly confronts the problem of generalizability. A mono-method approach would be unable to rebut claims that “Stanley,” the individual in question, was not representative of other delinquent young men.

By demonstrating how its central character’s deviant career was prompted by and entwined with the criminal opportunities afforded by the social milieu of early twentieth-century Chicago, Shaw is able to partially address concerns about representativeness. The account of social milieu Shaw developed draws on what we now recognize as the social ecology approach, one of whose principal applications is to the criminogenic effect of spatial organization and the built environment. The book is accompanied by two appendices, both being detailed maps, one of which is the places of residence of male juvenile delinquents in 1926 and the other the places of residence of adult male offenders in 1920. One of the established findings of the social ecology of career crime is that it is “geolocal”; persistent offenders do not generally travel far to commit their offenses. They therefore depend on the criminal opportunities present in a relatively small area ( Ackerman and Rossmo 2014 ). A further link between urban space and offending is that delinquency of the kind in which Stanley engaged is high in neighborhoods marked by social disorganization, bearing the physical features of environments not cared for by their residents or the inhabitants of the wider city (we now call this the “Broken Windows theory”). By the use of documentary and statistical information, including the maps, Shaw is able to ground Stanley’s experiences in a social milieu marked by community disorganization that was shared by many other young men resident in the relevant parts of the city. Indeed, the Institute for Juvenile Research, for which Shaw worked, collected hundreds of life histories by asking young men in correctional institutions to write the story of their life. It was the fact that nearly all of them came from the same highly disorganized slum areas that led Shaw to analyze delinquency as a product of neighborhood disorganization, radically discounting any psychological element in delinquent etiology ( Gelsthorpe 2007 ).

Shaw also includes another element of independent authority, in the form of a discussion at the close of the book written by another eminent sociologist, Ernest W. Burgess. The essay by Burgess treats Stanley’s account as a case study. Case Study Method is a systematic and inherently multimethod combination of field observation, interview, and documentary analysis about a specific area (e.g., a high-crime neighborhood) or, as in this case, a single individual ( Yin 2008 ). Burgess’s case study approach draws out the putative points at which ameliorative interventions with boys such as Stanley might have led to desistance and considers different techniques enabling such interventions. Shaw and the Institute for which he worked went on to apply and evaluate these interventions with young delinquent males by way of the Chicago Area Project, a step beyond most criminologists’ engagement with the applied policy world.

A final commonality between mixed methods and ethnographic methods apparent in the Jack Roller study are the steps toward reflexivity that Shaw made ( Gelsthorpe 2007 ). These are tantalizingly limited but undoubtedly present, and they represent methodological innovation to equal Shaw’s adoption of the life history method. Insight into them is afforded by the book The Jack Roller at Seventy ( Snodgrass 1982 ), which draws on letters between Shaw and Stanley, along with Stanley’s reminiscences. These document what became a lifelong friendship between the two, regularly tested by Stanley’s predilection for fighting and recurrent involvement in crime. Their age difference was not great (twelve years) but over a long and troubled life Stanley came to see Shaw as his father. It is unknown whether Shaw saw Stanley as a kind of son (Shaw had two daughters), but brief autobiographical statements by Shaw suggest parallels between Shaw and Stanley as children of large families who may have craved attention, and both certainly had experience of biological fathers who were aloof and emotionally distant ( Gelsthorpe 2007 ). The reflexivity angle makes a final methodological point. Mixed methods is not a special practice that replaces other methods. It preserves the strengths (and weaknesses) distinctive of the particular methods that it puts into combination. Reflexivity is a major strength of qualitative methods in general and ethnography in particular. In a mixed-methods study it can counteract the sometime arid remoteness of statistical measures.

Our second study also displays the analytical power of reflexivity, but it is brought to bear on a behavior that is now seen as less criminal than when first studied. The study remains a landmark contribution to the sociology of deviance. Methodologically, Howard Becker’s “Learning to Become a Marihuana User” combined participant observation with informal interviews and group discussions, and is thus an instance of mixing methods that are all qualitative: although Becker (1970) has a persuasive argument that qualitative methods are “implicitly numerical,” both because counting is an innate aid to human reasoning and because the power of data as evidence in qualitative work often draws on simple majority tests. Becker’s study was originally published as a journal article but is now also available as a short book ( Becker 2015 ). The analytical power of the study is Becker’s application of learning theory in the context of the small group. He demonstrates that the psychopharmacological effects of the drug are not pleasant in themselves and can indeed be both unpleasant and disconcerting. One has to learn to like the sensations associated with using marihuana. Existing users are the vehicle for learning not only how to take marihuana but how to enjoy the effects. The “high” is neither automatic nor intrinsic. Enjoyment is the result of an interaction of pharmacology, expectation, and environment. The latter accounts for the contribution the marihuana study made to Becker’s landmark analyses of the social process of making insiders and outsiders in cultures and subcultures.

We will not labor over the claim to mixed-method status that the study can make, as it is one of the best-known studies in social science. Becker partly supported his graduate studies by working as a jazz pianist. This brought him into encounter with marihuana among small groups of fellow musicians in the early 1950s, when use was not common among college students. Tantalized, Becker had to undergo the same learning process in respect of marihuana as that described in his article, and his participant observation was marked initially by nausea and headaches but also by experienced users telling him how to interpret the sensations he was experiencing. Enhanced enjoyment of music was a key way in for Becker. This led him to pose all sorts of questions which comprise the “informal interviewing” and group discussion components of the study. In this is manifest a fundamental affordance of mixing methods—the ability to pursue, rebut, and refine analytical hunches, testing hypotheses against different sources of data, all with their own distinctive angle, in an approach which Becker (1970) came to call “sequential analysis.” The researcher responds to some phenomenon in the field by forming a hypothesis, tests it against further observations and indirect accounts (e.g., interview data) of the phenomenon, refines the hypothesis in light of these tests, and through repetition of this process progressively hones the hypothesis until it fits all the dimensions of all the instances of the phenomenon about which data are available.

Some treatments of ethnography present it as inherently multimethod (as per the earlier point about the virtual inescapability of asking questions in the field) and when one has several sources of data on the same phenomenon it is entirely natural to compare the angle on it afforded by a given data source against the others. It becomes obvious that some data are best gotten by a particular method and that some methods cannot provide some kinds of data at all, requiring the use of another method. It is an equally obvious further step to weigh the account given by data from a particular method against the accounts given by the other methods in use. Classic anthropological ethnography involves a long time spent in the field (conventionally at least a year), giving plenty of scope to draw on all the information sources available, and since such ethnography involved learning the language of the group under study, ethnographers could not escape thinking about equivalence of meaning and had lots of opportunities to test with culture members whether they had got their interpretations right. An account by Agar (1985) of the nuances accompanying a village cook’s preparation of the lunch Agar took with him during fieldwork attests to the subtleties of interpretation to which time in the field is one response but another is being able to draw on data from a different method.

These considerations find new nuances when we consider the third example, a highly controversial doctoral study published as the book Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places ( Humphreys 1970 ). In mixed-methods terms, Laud Humphreys’ study combined nonparticipant observation with document analysis. The form that the nonparticipant observation took was just one of the controversial elements of a study that is a type case in the ethical challenges of fieldwork. Humphreys’ was a study in sexual deviance and its analytical concerns revolved around the ways “straight” men justified to themselves their participation in casual homosexual encounters in public toilets. Humphreys described his field observation as nonparticipant on the basis that a role for an “observer” was built into the everyday practice of homosexual encounters in public toilets. The role was that of “Watch Queen,” a third party who would watch out for the police while the dyad engaged in brief, wordless sexual intercourse. The possibility cannot be refuted that some watch queens derive voyeuristic gratification from performing the role, and much of the controversy that came in the train of Humphreys’ book concerned his own sexuality.

To pursue his objective of understanding how the men who participated in these activities reconciled it with their “normal” lives and heterosexual relationships, Humphreys needed a means to identify who the men were. Through a police department contact Humphreys gained access to the name and address records of automobile owners. Having recorded the license plate details of the “tearoom” participants Humphreys was able to identify who the men were. He would let several months elapse (with a view to the men forgetting his appearance, an appearance he also disguised) and would then contact them requesting an interview. Among other topics in the semistructured interview schedule (which were of no analytic interest to his study) Humphreys included questions relating to relationships and sexuality. At interview, Humphreys made no reference to being a researcher, instead presenting as a health service fieldworker.

A large fraction of Humphreys’ participants were “regular family men,” practicing Catholics, and respected members of their community. As an ordained priest, this was of particular interest to Humphreys. He found from the interview data that the sexual element in the relationship between these men and their wives had largely subsided or had never been strong, and they increasingly sought a sexual outlet in the “tearooms” to be found in parks and other public places. This group of men was only one type in the typology of adaptations to casual homosexual encounters that Humphreys drew up as the backbone of his analysis. Some men were what we might now call “closet gays” and were conflicted about their behavior, others had recourse to various rationalizations to avoid their sexual encounters bearing destructive messages for their self-identity, and others acknowledged that they were bisexual. Outright homosexuals were a minority of his sample, 14 percent.

Thus, analytically, this was an extremely important and instructive study in the sociology of deviance. However, it hardly needs saying that even as described here the study posed daunting ethical questions, and there is much else one could say about the study that makes its approach dubious if not subject to outright condemnation. For one thing, if one reads closely one discovers that the “typology” Humphreys constructed, with detailed pen portraits of key individuals taken as representative of a given type, were not about real individuals at all. They were composites, with aspects of one individual combined with other aspects of other individuals. Although Humphreys treated these as ideal types or epitomes, the fact is that they were artful constructions, and quite how Humphreys decided to take a particular trait not only as representative but as the right one to combine with a trait drawn from the biography of another individual altogether is not something Humphreys explained.

From a mixed-methods perspective, it is likely the case that Humphreys could not have obtained such compelling evidence for his analysis of how heterosexual men excuse participation in homosexual acts without playing a duplicitous fieldwork role and making illicit use of police records. The question is whether the value of the analysis justifies the subterfuge, even if one discounts the real possibility that Humphreys may himself have been subject to violence if any of the men he interviewed realized he had watched them in the tearooms, not to mention the damage such a realization could do to the unwitting participant in his study. Mixed methods do not provide an avenue or heuristic for resolving such issues.

Methodologically, the important point is that when one combines methods one does so by acting in accord with the data quality criteria of each method separately before combining the findings from the methods in combination. Thus, evaluating the quality of the nonparticipant observation would rely on characteristic criteria such as the number of tearoom events observed, whether tearooms attracting different types of participant were observed, whether there was reactivity from participants to Humphreys’ presence, and so on. In similar terms, the interview data would be evaluated in terms of issues of rapport, question design, and so on. As to the document element, without which Humphreys could not have obtained an interview sample, one would want to know how accurate the police database was (did Humphreys show up at any wrong addresses, for instance), whether Humphreys had been stringently accurate in recording the license plate details, and exactly what relationship Humphreys was able to call on to gain access to the records in the first place. After all, where a researcher has created “composite types” perhaps other parts of the study could have involved a degree of “creative” inference. Perhaps the best gauge of the troubling nature of this work, despite its analytical contribution, is the fact that a number of Humphreys’ colleagues in his academic department resigned when his study was published. A mixed-methods design is not a panacea, and the Janus face of the power it derives from combining methods is that it can pose serious ethical dilemmas. In contemporary research, for instance, the affordances of freely available online databases makes it dangerously possible to identify individuals, as in a case where combining qualitative interviews with car owners and a database of the distribution of different makes of car led to identification of the sole individual owning an expensive type of car in a US state with low population density. As a result a major part of the study remains unpublished.

Our final example is John Van Maanen’s landmark study of police identity formation, tracing the occupational socialization process through formal (police academy) and informal (first beat posting) stages, reported in book chapters and articles, notably “ Police Socialization: A Longitudinal Examination of Job Attitudes in an Urban Police Department ” (1975). Organizational (or occupational) socialization is the process by which neophytes learn the expected behaviors and the attitudes that support these behaviors in order to claim the status of a legitimate member of an organization.

Of our four examples, Van Maanen’s is closest to the classic mixed-methods research design combining a survey questionnaire with ethnographic interviews and participant observation. Of particular interest methodologically are three points. First, Van Maanen went on to become an eminent ethnographer, applying ethnographic method with stunning creative insight in studies as disparate as skateboarding in Disneyland and the working lives of deep sea fishing crews, and promoting ethnographic methods as one of the two founding editors of the Sage qualitative research methods series. Second, to conduct the ethnographic element of his study of police identity, Van Maanen underwent police academy training, and subsequently spent a sustained period observing operational assignments, although at no point did he do other than acknowledge that he was a researcher. His engaging accounts of his own struggles with competence in the everyday tasks of routine policing, such as operating a police squad car in an emergency, prompt much reflection on our assumptions about “passing” in the field. Third, this was a longitudinal study, with the research instruments and methods being administered to successive waves of police recruits.

Mixed methods was still at its formative stage when Van Maanen conducted his study, and as we discuss further, the principal aim of mixing methods at the time was to enhance the reliability and validity of research findings. Cross-checking findings from one method against those from another was the essence of the undertaking. To this, Van Maanen added the longitudinal element, also seen as a means of enhancing reliability and validity by seeing whether similar results obtain over time and among different sets of research participants. Indeed, one of the signal stages of his study came from the application of the longitudinal approach to his own presence in the field. After leaving the field, writing up his doctorate and commencing his academic career, Van Maanen decided to conduct another round of police fieldwork. The events that unfolded there provide telling insights not only into researcher reflexivity but also the vulnerabilities to which participant observation is susceptible. Van Maanen’s original fieldwork had abruptly ended when he witnessed the beating of a drunk in the back of a police van. After the citizen sobered up, he launched an undue force complaint against police, and his lawyers threatened to subpoena Van Maanen’s field notes. Van Maanen refused, opening him to a contempt of court charge and a lengthy prison sentence. Although the case was settled out of court by the police department, this episode boosted his esteem among his police colleagues. Van Maanen came to recognize that on his return, his former police colleagues were “playing” to him as researcher, demonstrating that they were “tough guys” to a man. The subpoena episode had convinced them that he was one of them, and the resulting displays of street justice were as reliable as data as it would have been if Van Maanen had used the script of a cops and robbers B movie as field notes.

As the subtitle of the featured article indicates, the quantitative element of the research design was a conventional, if detailed, attitude survey questionnaire. This was administered to recruits of the police academy in whose program he had participated himself. Longitudinal questionnaire administration allowed change in measured attitudes held by sample members to be tracked over time. From its origin in the work of Caplow (1964) , organizational socialization theory has assumed that the influence of the organization over member attitudes is strongest at the earliest points of membership. This is on the basis that at this stage, the organization is prime among sources of guidelines for member behavior. The theory also expects that, if impactful at that stage, the organization will remain a major determinant of later attitudes and behavior. One may regard this as the essential premise of training and the primary justification for investing time and effort in it. However, while Van Maanen found that recruits entered the police highly motivated and committed to their new organization, their motivational attitudes soon sharply declined. From his fieldwork, Van Maanen discovered that the less motivated patrolmen were seen by their supervisors as better officers than their more motivated peers. Questionnaire data showed that commitment attitudes also fell over time, albeit staying high relative to several other occupational groups Van Maanen examined. From both the questionnaire response and the fieldwork, Van Maanen learned that good supervisor evaluations boosted recruits’ commitment. Supervisor influence was again manifest in needs satisfaction, which remained broadly constant over time, with supervisor evaluations of recruit performance once again featuring, these being correlated with reported satisfaction.

Thus, what emerged from comparing the questionnaire measures of motivation, commitment, and satisfaction with the fieldwork testimony about the influence of supervisors was a picture of the rapidly declining hold of lessons learned in the police academy and their swift replacement by workgroup adaptations generated through workplace relations and reinforced by occupational culture. The questionnaire responses periodically administered during training and early service provided measures of attitude change but could not reveal their source. Drawing particularly on the fieldwork, and his own experience alongside police, Van Maanen was able to document the predominance of a “lay low, don’t make waves” approach to everyday police work which explained the patterns found in the questionnaire data. Van Maanen’s study gave rise to an understanding of the rapidly declining salience of formal socialization and the rising salience of informal socialization via the encounter with the realities of everyday police work, in which a signal moment was one’s first beat posting. This pattern has been replicated internationally, by Fielding (1988) in the United Kingdom, Chan, Devery, and Doran (2003) in Australia, Alain in Québec (e.g., Alain and Gregoire 2008 ), and Jaschke in Germany (e.g., Jaschke and Neidhardt 2007 ), and is generally accepted as the essential challenge faced by police training where such training is oriented to improving police service delivery by, for instance, greater community engagement and reduced use of force.

Epistemological Assumptions and Requirements

In the methodology sphere, a principal reservation about the mixed-methods approach is that combining methods with entirely different ontological and epistemological premises is fundamentally unsound and cannot produce reliable and valid results ( Blaikie 1991 ). Debates in the methods field often refer to this as the problem of “commensurateness.” It is obvious that different methods make different assumptions about what counts as evidence and about the status or nature of “evidence.” At the extreme, this involves discounting the idea of evidence altogether, or maintaining that any discipline concerned with human behavior cannot produce conclusive evidence or absolute proof in the same way that the natural sciences produce axiomatic knowledge. What is less obvious is whether working from different assumptions necessarily makes comparing findings from different methods impossible.

A useful starting point in exploring this issue is to identify precisely what form the differences in assumptions takes. The most profoundly different assumptions at the epistemological level are found in the domain of qualitative methods. Users of these methods negotiate fundamental concerns about reflexivity (the influence of the embodied researcher on the findings collected via methods where the researcher is the “research instrument,” such as observational fieldwork or interview methods), subjectivity (the extent to which positionality and standpoint influence the data collected and the way it is analyzed), and inference (the evidential status of utterances and behavior elicited in fieldwork) to name but a few prominent concerns. A flavor of how deeply these matters can affect the assumed status of “data” and “analysis” is afforded by the “interviews as accounts” critique ( Lyman and Scott 1989 ). Like the ethnomethodologists who followed them, Lyman and Scott challenge practitioners of the interview method on the grounds that since one cannot inhabit a respondent’s head, it is ultimately impossible to look to interviews to produce truths. What is observable “on the surface” of response may be subject to a host of hidden motives. In the context of criminology (many of whose studies concern agents of criminal justice), low motives such as presenting their work in a good light or diverting attention from malpractice may corrupt interview response. A variant of this argument is that respondents themselves may not “know their own mind.” Whether one is persuaded that these are absolute rebuttals of the robustness of interview data is a question of one’s skepticism about the quality controls that the field has developed. A basic way of checking for respondents who do not know their own mind is to look for phrases of prevarication or long pauses in the transcript. A more sophisticated method is to engage in longitudinal interviews. As to those whose response flows from low motives, unless a respondent is professional about lying, repeat interviews will catch out inconsistencies, in much the same way as does the investigative interview. Similar points can be made about qualitative work with offenders, who have an obvious interest in presenting their behavior in a better light than their record suggests.

A rule of thumb is that the more closely a given method adheres to positivist assumptions, the more amenable its practitioners will be to the practice of mixing methods. As already noted, criminological ethnographers (like ethnographers more generally) routinely mix methods, and we might ponder how often they reflect on differences of reflexivity, subjectivity, and inference between, say, findings from participant observation and impromptu (nonstandardized) interviews in the field. Methodological approaches that pursue what Durkheim called “social facts,” and regard the right way to pursue them as conducting empirical research, have a baseline affinity for the positivist approach. This will not satisfy those for whom reflexivity, subjectivity, and inference, are “killer” critiques. At the extreme of such positions is “postmodernism,” whose latest variant is the idea of antimethod, social inquiry without method. Working from an antifoundationalist perspective, St. Pierre (2015 : 79) writes that

the very idea of method forces one into a prescribed order of thought and practices that prohibits the experimental nature of transcendental empiricism. Method proscribes and prohibits. It controls and disciplines. Further, method always comes too late, is immediately out of date…. Method not only can’t keep up with events, it prevents them from coming into existence.

Taking this approach, Koro-Ljungberg (2015) espouses “methodologies without methodology,” that is, without strict boundaries or normative structures, with the aim of creating “a sense of uncertainty and loss of stable, fixed, pre-conceptualized, or historical knowledge.” Given the slippery nature of whatever it is that such approaches may find, it would indeed be hard to combine them with findings from methods that have settled systematic procedures allowing them to be delivered in a way that is accountable to others. However, even extreme forms of postmodernism carry recognizable methodological premises; it is just that the criteria they apply are so severe that it is virtually impossible to fully deliver them in the real world. Superficial critiques of postmodernism abound, but if one engages closely with the arguments put forward it is possible to see scope for incorporating moderate forms of postmodernism into mixed methods ( Fielding 2009 ).

Although the quantitative domain is not without attention to reflexivity, subjectivity, and problems of inference (particularly in respect of the survey interview: Gobo and Mauceri 2014 , these issues are of less concern to practitioners of quantitative methods. Nevertheless, quantitative researchers are somewhat more apt than before to acknowledge issues of reflexivity, subjectivity, and inference. This brings us to the present domain in which mixed methods largely operate, characterized as “postpositivism.” While this position recognizes the issues of reflexivity, subjectivity and inference, it essentially responds in a “we can handle it” fashion. That is, it responds with measures to accommodate specific threats during the research process and it acknowledges in debates over the status of findings that these issues are real and that they make a single, comprehensive, definitive account of a given social phenomenon harder, if not impossible, to achieve. A quite common trope in research done in the postpositivist mixed-methods frame is that of the diamond, whose many facets each provide a glimpse of the element at the diamond’s core but none of which on their own can provide a complete image of the diamond ( Bazeley 2017 ). We might add that since a diamond can be recut, there is no practical end to the proliferation of facets whose essence must be captured to complete the picture.

To cap the discussion of epistemological issues we should note that it is generally accepted among advocates of mixed methods that the underpinning epistemology for combining findings from different methods is pragmatic philosophy, specifically the American pragmatic philosophy of James, Peirce, and Dewey. The “fixes” for the issues that commensurateness presents flow from this tradition. They take the form of measures to control and optimize the practice of each method in combination. A qualitative example relating to subjectivity would be keeping a fieldwork diary so that observational data can be checked against the fieldworker’s disposition on the day that a given field note was taken. A quantitative example relating to reflexivity would be a survey researcher building in reverse sequence questions (which ask the same thing in negation or with the opposite response set, where a “yes” would equate to a “no” when the question was first asked) to identify inconsistent responses. Importantly, these quality controls are applied to each method in isolation before seeking to bring findings from them together.

These assumptions, approaches, and procedures are characteristic of classical mixed methods, which pursued what was called “triangulation” for convergent validation. The idea was that if the same findings emerged from fundamentally different methods, validity was enhanced. According to this approach, it was important to avoid combining methods which suffered the same threats to validity as that could simply multiply error. It was assumed that each method bore characteristic errors (weaknesses) as well as characteristic affordances (strengths). This enabled the threats to validity associated with the method to be predicted and therefore to be checked. This made a given instance of the application of the method accountable. Similarly, the distinctive strength a given method brought to the table could be anticipated, which allowed the mixed-method researcher to home in on what they could best know from each method in combination. This enabled a considered research design to be formulated. More important, it made the data collection and data analysis choices of the researcher more transparent, more readily available for inspection by others.

The pursuit of convergent validation remains an important objective for research adhering to the premises of triangulation, especially in policy-related research. However, in recent years it has been joined, if not supplanted, by an approach which mixes methods for the objective of “analytic density” ( Fielding 2009 ). This approach works from a postpositivist position. It also connects with the distinction between a “research project” and a “research program.” The former is a single enterprise with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The latter is a series of connected projects, whose culmination may never come about, at least under the tenancy of the researcher who initiated it. Work taking an analytic density approach seeks a full, in-the-round understanding of a social phenomenon, and is always ready to entertain or incorporate relevant new knowledge. Mixing methods is highly appropriate to such an approach, since incorporating a project with a new method is one obvious way to gain new insights. But note the tension between this and the triangulation approach. If the business is convergent validation there should be a right answer, whereas the analytic density approach is always eager to add new dimensions, including those that arise from contradiction between the findings from one method and the findings from another. In the triangulation approach, such contradictions would have the researcher scurrying back to the design and data collection stage to see if something has gone “wrong.” In the analytic density approach, contradictions are accepted as signs of an imperfect understanding of the phenomenon, one that requires a rethinking of the analysis and possibly the application of further methods. In Fielding and Fielding (1986) , we describe a puzzling case where support for the recruitment of Black police officers expressed by White police recruits who had otherwise expressed harshly racist views was resolved by reinspecting data from qualitative interviews. It turned out that the recruits favored recruitment of Afro-Caribbeans because they could be assigned to “black” areas, in effect, an approach based on racial segregation.

Recent developments in research technology crystallize some of the issues in play in mixed methods. Software for qualitative data analysis emerged in the 1990s and has established itself as a substantial resource, with approximately twenty programs on the market. Tagged “CAQDAS” by Ray Lee and I ( Fielding and Lee 1993 )—because Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis is a “thorny” issue for qualitative researchers—the software can support both a triangulation approach and an analytic density approach, but in the minds of some it is associated with positivist premises they reject and see as threatening creativity. This is not the place to pursue that debate, but we should note that CAQDAS is eminently useful in supporting mixed methods. Since the earliest days it has provided two-way gateways to statistical analysis packages, enabling export of quantified qualitative data and import of quantitative data from, for example, SPSS. Since data from quantitative parts of a project can be held alongside data from qualitative parts of the project, comparative analysis is facilitated, with the package serving as a “one-stop shop” in a way that no quantitative package emulates. All CAQDAS packages provide tools and features with which to prepare data matrices for comparison and tabulation. Where geographic information is an element of a project (e.g., in a social ecology approach to crime patterns) georeferenced features are important and several packages offer these, enabling the comparative analysis of spatial information alongside qualitative data and quantitative data expressed as variables (see Verd and Fielding 2021 ). Most support not only the code-and-retrieve procedures that are the backbone of systematic qualitative data analysis but also Boolean retrievals, which enable systematic comparative analysis without converting qualitative data to numbers. Such applications enable Qualitative Comparative Analysis (see Ragin 1987 ) and other structured applications of set theory. Even researchers who do not make use of the analytic features of these packages find them useful as a means of data management. To give one example, the Atlas.ti package has a feature that allows users to recode data extracts globally or selectively in a single mouse click, allowing them to recast or interrogate their coded data instantly, a task that is highly time-consuming manually. A researcher who finds an unexpected relationship in a quantitative data set would be able to check for its presence in qualitative data quickly and thoroughly.

Policy Implications of Ethnographic Mixed-Methods Research

Despite the increasing profile in the research community of those who trumpet the mixed-methods approach, it cannot yet be described as universally accepted and the practice remains somewhat controversial in methodology circles. Mixed-methods studies are on the rise as a proportion of work conducted under the broad rubric of social science, but it is interesting to note that a substantial share of this work has been conducted outside the social science mainstream, in pockets around nursing and health studies, education research, and social policy ( Ivankova and Kawamura 2010 ). One might speculate that such fields come relatively late to social research methodologies other than the survey and so are perhaps more open to innovation. However, an alternative explanation is that such fields are more heavily reliant for research funding on government and other nonacademic commissioning bodies than are those which usually seek funding from publicly funded research councils that customarily have a hands-off stance toward government (e.g., the Social Science Research Council in Canada, the National Science Foundation in the United States, the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany). There is no implication here about the quality or standing of the respective disciplines. Rather, researchers in mainstream disciplines like sociology, political science, economics, and psychology are traditionally more strongly oriented to research topics generated from within their disciplines than from responsiveness to the needs of the policy world.

Whatever the explanation of trends in the adoption of research methodologies, which are in any case likely to draw on several factors (including intellectual coherence, not just the realpolitik of funding), much of the impetus toward adoption of mixed methods can be attributed to work in the applied research sphere. This is evident in, for example, invitations to tender (ITT) for research contracts issued by government departments that commission social research. In some domains, mixed-methods designs are sufficiently orthodox as to be assumed, with calls and ITTs requiring that successful bidders integrate data from different methods. An example in the criminological domain is the UK College of Policing “rapid evidence assessments” (REAs), where an eclectic evidence base is assumed. ITTs to conduct REAs include an explicit hierarchy of evidence, emulating the formal pecking order of evidence issued by the Campbell Collaboration, a body that promotes and publishes systematic reviews in crime and justice. While the “Maryland Scale,” which places the random control trial at the summit of its hierarchy of evidential quality, and qualitative research at the bottom, long predominated, even Campbell latterly accepted the value of qualitative research, particularly in respect of its ability to explain the “why” and “how” of criminal justice interventions, with quantitative studies identifying “what works.” The point is that this is not simply the story of the varying fortunes of quantitative and qualitative methods but also the story of an increasing awareness that full explanation requires an articulation between findings from quantitative and qualitative research.

Since it is more expensive to run separate studies and to bring together their findings only after they have been separately published and disseminated, eventually reaching the policy community, there is a pragmatic rationale in commissioning research that combines the quantitative and qualitative from the outset. Those who engage directly with the research commissioning arm of government and other policy-oriented bodies find less concern with justifying methods in terms of epistemological rectitude and more of an inclination to assume in a commonsense way that different requirements to justify a new policy with evidence or to evaluate an implemented policy will necessitate the use of a variety of methods that come at the issue from more than one angle. Social programs are marked by stages of conception and implementation before they reach the stage of outcomes, and the weak point of the logic model of many social interventions is understanding the implementation stage ( Ekblom 2010 ). It is undeniable that for many decades those who commissioned policy research regarded quantitative research not only as essential but as the only legitimate social research method, largely because they required findings that were “representative” and generalizable to the whole population affected by a given policy. Latterly, it has come to be recognized that outcomes are determined by implementation stage factors, and these are the least well-captured by quantitative methods. They require qualitative work “on the ground” to see how a policy intervention is being understood and put into practice.

Although there is no one “best” form of mixed methods, the most common form is the use of a quantitative approach to get an idea of the reach and effects of an intervention followed by qualitative work to examine how and why the intervention reaches those it does and excludes those it does not, and how and why it has its effects on those who are reached. The mixed-methods world has generated a shorthand to classify mixed-method research designs ( Morse and Niehaus 2009 ). The design just mentioned is classified as QUAN → qual, denoting that the main method is quantitative (often a survey), with the qualitative method (often interviews) used to seek explanations for relationships observed in the quantitative data, and with the arrow indicating the sequence in which the two parts of the design are performed. Variations on upper and lower case, and in the sequence in which the parts are performed, provide the complete classification.

For those who are dubious of such neat classifications, which may include many ethnographers, and certainly includes the present author, this cannot be the end of the mixed-methods research design story. Many mixed-methods studies use more than two methods, many mixed-methods researchers do not regard one or another method as “main,” and methods may be used in an intertwined way rather than rigidly sequenced. Most importantly, the adoption of an easily digested classification, which in some accounts is more or less explicitly designed to sell mixed methods to postgraduates and embed mixed methods in the next generation, works against creativity. The whole point of mixing methods is to let the research problem dictate the research design and wherever engaging with a social phenomenon is driven by exploration and discovery it will be impossible to fix in advance what methodological combination is precisely right. As we pursue the contours of the phenomenon we recognize that here we need more documentary analysis, there we need key informant testimony and so on. That, at least, is to look at it from the researcher’s view.

Naturally there are other interests to take into account and in policy research that will include responding to the agenda of policymakers and working with their understanding of methodology, an understanding that is unlikely to include much enthusiasm for research that does not want to pin down in advance exactly how the policymaker’s questions will be answered. However, policy bodies generally have their own research branch, even if it is largely confined to dealing with commissioning and receiving reports of completed commissions. It is not unknown for well-argued flexibility to receive a fair hearing, and it is not only possible but incumbent upon researchers who engage with policy work to seek to educate those who commission and receive policy research. Indeed, policy organizations increasingly recognize both ethnographic work and the embedding of such work in mixed-methods designs as legitimate. Ethnography and other qualitative approaches have a role in policy development, for instance, in pilot work to identify what aspects of an issue merit testing using quantitative methods such as a survey. We have also already noted that ethnography as an element in a mixed-methods design has a role in policy evaluation, one specifically addressing the implementation stage of a program or intervention. One further implication for policy is that the inclusion of an ethnographic element in a mixed-methods research design may be regarded as having greater robustness than a research design relying solely on ethnography. In that respect, adoption of a mixed-methods approach can be seen as legitimating its ethnographic component to policymakers. In this regard, it is worth noting that there is no reason that the ethnographic component should not be the principal method in the design.

Where ethnography is to the fore in a research design, it can bring a social justice dimension to the understanding of complex phenomena, such as the role of housing deprivation in poverty; the interrelationships between legal and bureaucratic frameworks, politics, and healthcare that set the conditions for urban violence at neighborhood level in large cities; and the everyday operation of penal power and prisoner adaptations to it. Contemporary examples of such work in committed, social justice work include Desmond (2016) , Vargas (2016) , and Crewe (2009) . In this context, it is worth mentioning that where a mixed-methods design involves ethnography as its primary method the inclusion of a quantitative element can provide policymakers with early findings. This is important where those who have commissioned the research are answerable to their organization’s policy branch and/or to political appointees, since producing early results can provide a timely element showing the broad contours of the likely findings. Since quantitative data can often be processed and analyzed ahead of the qualitative element of a study they can have a role in keeping research commissioners and their masters on side with a study whose full findings will take longer to assemble. In a reversal of the usual format, a QUAL → quan design that derives its principal insights from ethnographic work can make use of a quantitative element to confirm the extent of observed relationships and explore the variations in their application. For instance, Crewe (2009) is a study of a medium-security prison; a quantitative element could explore its application to remand institutions, local prisons, and high-security prisons. Also, the study draws on an unusually large number of life history interviews (N = 120). Such sample sizes support quantitative analysis of major themes.

A Brief Look at Possible Future Directions

We earlier noted the regard that policymakers and those who commission research for policy purposes have for mixed methods. In doing so, a distinction was drawn between applied research funders and the funding bodies that support “pure” research. If there ever was such a thing as “pure,” that moment has long passed. Each of the national research funders mentioned earlier, and their equivalents across other developed societies, now rank the needs of its host society and, especially, its economy and labor market, as a top priority. “Basic research” is still funded, but largely in the natural sciences and medicine. Increasingly, the policy agenda that was once confined to the government interest has become the agenda of the “pure research” funders too. If that is so, criminology must take note.

This is not to say that the criminological imagination must be subordinated to the policy agenda. In an age of citizen science, citizen reportage, and social media, the social sciences have lost their monopoly on the study of society. One future we would do well to embrace involves working alongside the nonacademic communities that take an interest in crime, as victims, agents of social control, and even ostensible perpetrators. Rather than try to stem the tide of engagement with crime phenomena by those lacking formal qualifications, we should look to ways we can facilitate their inquiries and help them avoid the mistakes the discipline has painfully learned to avoid. A community group that draws inferences from the characteristics of offenders in large cities to those at local level, and disseminates this “news” via social media, can be helped to frame the relationship in a more sophisticated way. Another future on similar lines is that of the co-production of research with subject communities and, particularly, subject indigenous communities. Mixed methods is a practice that has in recent years facilitated research relationships that are respectful of indigenous communities, making new forms of publication agreements, training community members as researchers, and providing access to technologies that give community members a voice (see Beaton et al. 2017 ). These considerations are especially important in that a substantial share of studies involving these communities concern crime and social deviance, such as studies of alcoholism and substance abuse, domestic violence, and mental illness. There is a natural affinity between ethnography and Indigenous Knowledge, making ethnography a particularly valuable element of mixed-methods projects involving First Nations, Native American, and Maori peoples.

Although criminology is in a sense as old as any other form of human inquiry, the modern discipline had its origin in eugenics, phrenology, and putting architecture to service in aid of penal servitude. This dark past saw the discipline entirely responsive to the needs of the state, with little distinction between the intellectual concerns of the field and what we now call “applied research.” We have moved on far indeed from that past, to some extent liberated by perspectives that recognized crime as a special case of social deviance, a move that spawned a flowering of conceptual and theoretical development. But the concerns of a discipline so closely tied to the health of society cannot proceed in isolation from what surrounds it. Wherever our concerns touch on the practical workings of crime and criminal justice they touch on the empirical. Ethnography done well captivates. It can crystallize in a vignette or an interview extract the lived experiential reality that a suite of statistical relationships cannot wholly capture. But work in a field like criminology needs both depth and reach. Mixed methods can help the ethnographer’s “aha moment” live across a social domain.

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Article contents

Historical methods in criminology.

• Paul Knepper Paul Knepper Justice Studies, San José State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.843
• Published online: 22 March 2023

The history of historical methods in criminology reveals a variety of possibilities. Before the 1970s, legal history represented historical research in criminology, although it had more to do with the development of legal doctrine than the study of crime and criminal justice. In the 1970s, the new social history emphasized alternatives to traditional archival research, including oral history, material culture studies, and statistical analyses. Oral history and material culture methods have been used for some historical studies in criminology but are less common than statistical analyses of time-series data. Historians and criminologists have produced innovations in modeling long-term crime trends. The cultural turn of the 1980s brought “histories of the present” and expanded the range of sources beyond legal documents and crime statistics to include a wider range of texts, including newspapers and novels. The digital revolution of the 1990s, as well as the construction of digital archives, has enabled research completely online and made sources for transnational history accessible. Within the past decade, criminologists and historians have started to think about historical criminology, a method that bridges history and criminology, and is well positioned to pursue several projects, including plural time, memory, and microhistory. The choice of historical method depends in part on whether “history from below” is important, as envisioned decades ago, when the new social history began to influence historical research in criminology.

• history from below
• digitization
• historical criminology
• history of the present
• microhistory

Introduction

Since the late 20th century , historical research has secured a place in criminology, although not necessarily where it was meant to be. For historians, crime became a subject of investigation during the 1970s with the arrival of the new social history. Social historians emphasized the need to discover the everyday lives of ordinary people—laborers, women, the urban poor—and now had something of interest to criminology. Not the chronicles of model institutions or the lives of great reformers, but a view of crime and criminal justice grounded in the experiences of convicts, criminals, rebels, and prisoners ( Hay et al., 1975 ; Hobsbawm, 1969 ; Thompson, 1975 ). To pursue “history from below,” social historians promoted alternatives to the traditional method of archival research. Criminologists have practiced several of these alternatives, particularly statistical modeling techniques from social science history ( Eisner, 2014 ; Spierenburg, 2008 ), “histories of the present” associated with the “cultural turn” in the 1980s ( Garland, 2001 , 2002 ), and, beginning in the 1990s, digital history enabled by the establishment of online archives ( Godfrey, 2017 ; Shoemaker, 2019 ). But have alternative methods of historical research moved criminology closer to understanding the experience of ordinary people in the past?

Traditional Methods

The traditional method of historical writing was established in the late 19th century by the German historian Leopold von Ranke. At his Berlin seminar, he taught his students that the past cannot be judged by the standards of the present. The goal is to understand the past as the people who lived it understood it ( Warren, 2010 ). The Rankean approach has been referred to as historicism , although this term is confusing because it has also been used to mean the opposite approach. As Karl Popper (1957) used the word, it meant interpreting the past through a lens of historical laws, cycles, or stages, which is not what Ranke was doing. Rather, Ranke understood history as the contingent relationship of past events, built from scrutiny of documents.

To write history, only the purest, unfiltered accounts would do, and to find these, it was necessary to travel to archives. Historians should pursue primary sources : eyewitness accounts that originated at the time of the event under investigation. It is important to be alert, Ranke taught, to distortions, embellishments, and fabrication of the historical record introduced after events and to avoid settling for more accessible secondary sources, such as memoirs or chronicles. It is essential to sift through documents: searching for provenance, inquiring about authors, and understanding the circumstances in which they were written. Further, historians should avoid constructing their arguments on limited or selective sources. Only by exploring all available sources in archives and collections, as well as collating multiple accounts of the same event, can historians make conclusions ( Evans, 1997 , pp. 18–19).

Writing history can be compared to building a dry-stone wall ( Oakeshott, 1983 ). Building a wall without a mortar or chisel, as in Yorkshire, England, begins with collecting stones as they lay on the ground at the intended site of the wall. While judging the size and shape of the stones, the wall-builder fits them together: Large stones form the base, square stones for the sides, round stones at the top. There is no building plan; it depends on what is there. But the stones cannot be piled at random; otherwise, the wall will topple over with the first foul weather. A skilled dry-stone waller does not lug stones from another field, chisel them to fit, or toss odd shapes away. If the wall-builder has made the right decisions, the wall will stand for generations. Similarly, the historian assembles documents to make a coherent argument. The material must fit together, to form a pattern, without the mortar of laws or chisel of selectivity. The process requires imagination; without imagination, there can be no written history, only annals or chronicles. But there can be no predetermined design; what emerges depends on the evidence available. A document that contradicts the pattern cannot be overlooked but rather suggests the need for reevaluation. The argument needs to withstand the criticism of other historians who are familiar with the sources. If the historian can match the skill of the wall-builder, the structure can survive for generations.

Before the 1970s, lawyers dominated the writing of crime history. The eminent Victorians—James Fitzjames Stephen, Luke O. Pike, William Holdsworth—produced multivolume histories of English law. They followed methods learned within the legal profession; they identified important decisions and described the beliefs of those who made them. Legal history resembled traditional methods of historical inquiry: the lawyer-historians evaluated documents in libraries and archives. But they produced something more like what Popper rejected rather than what Ranke proposed. Legal historians brought the present to their work in the form of the practical needs of lawyers; they organized the past to fit contemporary legal concepts and doctrine ( Knepper, 2016 , pp. 6–9).

It required four decades for Leon Radzinowicz to produce his five-volume history of English law ( Radzinowicz, 1948 ). To write about law in England from the 18th century to the early 20th century , he read through a staggering amount of documents: 1,250 reports of commissions of inquiry, 3,000 accounts and papers, 800 annual reports, and 1,100 volumes of parliamentary debates. The final volume, coauthored with Roger Hood, on Victorian and Edwardian criminal justice policy, included 800 pages of annotated text from primary sources ( Radzinowicz & Hood, 1990 ). However, Radzinowicz wrote his history within the framework of “Progress” looking back from the 20th century . It was “history for lawyers,” as Hay (1984) observed, the portrayal of law as the accomplishment of a small clique of people trained in law and without reference to the wider social, economic, and political conflicts that generate legal questions and answers.

Microhistory offers the best example of the contribution of traditional methods of historical research to criminology. Microhistorians use legal texts but engage in a historical interpretation of these materials to grasp social, political, and cultural meanings. They specialize in the lives of forgotten individuals and their experiences in courts, prisons, and asylums. Microhistorians do refer back, implicitly or explicitly, to comparable series of activity, but their strategy for investigation is about particular cases, whether individuals, groups, or societies. They conduct a microscopic analysis of tiny details to explicate the abstractions of historical theory ( Kilday & Nash, 2017 ; Muir & Ruggerio, 1991 ).

“The historian’s knowledge,” microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg (1980 , p. 16) says, “is indirect, based on signs and scraps of evidence, conjectural.” Conjectural knowledge became the basis for the emerging historical sciences (archaeology, geology, astronomy, and paleontology, as well as history) in the 19th century . Because these sciences investigate causes that cannot be repeated, the investigator must infer what happened from traces in the present. But conjectural knowledge represents a much older way of knowing; it is informal knowledge, transmitted by word of mouth, based on accumulated experience that allows the observer to understand more than what is seen directly. In 1880 , Thomas Huxley, in a series of lectures publicizing Darwin’s work, defined the method common to the historical sciences as Zadig’s method, a reference to the ancient tale of hunters deciphering animal tracks to solve a murder ( Ginzburg, 1980 , p. 23).

Ginzburg also points out that conjectural knowledge is a “low” knowledge, the kind “which exists everywhere in the world, without geographic, historical, ethnic, gender or class exception,” but the property of those who in a given society are not in a position of power, different from any “high” or superior form of knowledge restricted to an elite ( Ginzburg, 1980 , p. 29). Traditional historical writing, then, represents a method of knowing among common, ordinary people. It is a “bottom-up” form of inquiry: the way in which people in low places within society make sense of their world.

The New Social History

The arrival of the new social history in the 1970s brought about an interest in historical methods. Traditional historians wrote about military campaigns, diplomatic intrigues, and political strategies; they narrated the events that changed the course of kingdoms and nations. To do this, they made use of documents—treaties, correspondence, and diaries—left by political and military leaders. The new social historians turned the focus away from the extraordinary feats of a few privileged families and toward the everyday activities of “the masses” as they went about their lives. Rather than history from the top down, the new social history looked at the past from the bottom up: the experiences of women, the laboring poor, and the dangerous classes ( Stearns, 1980 ).

As the style of historical writing shifted from descriptive to analytical, historians began to consider methods and choices. “Although it might be exaggerating the case to speak of a methodological revolution in the 1970s,” Michael Kammen (1980 , p. 31) put it, “a revolution in awareness surely has occurred.” Traditional historians did not feel obliged to discuss their methods. They did not reveal the process of discovery, or arrangement, or evaluation—how they fit the stones together to make the wall. The new social history brought a suspicion of documents: what was the purpose for writing them, how they came to be the archives, and what was left out. Because those nearer the floor of society do not leave diaries, correspondence, and other narrative sources, social historians emphasized the need for alternative methodologies, including quantitative studies, oral history, and material culture history. Computer-assisted statistical analyses of data offered a means of mapping social structures, including mobility, urbanization, and migration. Oral history interviews provided a window into the past for Indigenous peoples, women, and others without written records. Material culture, the things people have left behind, such as tools, toys, and clothing, could reveal the hidden life of social institutions: the family, factory, asylum, and school ( Kammen, 1980 ).

More so than anyone else, the British Marxist historians brought the history from below to criminology. Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson, and the Warwick School were labor historians who wrote about “primitive rebels,” individuals regarded by the authorities as criminals but respected as champions by their own communities. They revealed the preconscious political struggles of poachers, smugglers, bandits, wreckers, and arsonists. The British Marxist historians demonstrated the relevance of history to criminology, the importance of social theory in historical investigation, and had a particular influence on the radical criminology. Crime and Social Justice , the journal founded at the capital of radical criminology in the 1970s, the University of California at Berkeley, brought Albion’s Fatal Tree ( 1975 ) and Whigs and Hunters ( 1975 ) to its readers ( Ray, 1976 , p. 91).

Despite their contribution to radical theory, the British Marxist historians pursued a conservative approach to historical methods. Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels ( 1959 ), the study that introduced “social crime,” relies on narrative documents he found in European libraries and archives. Whigs and Hunters ( 1975 ), as well as the studies in Albion’s Fatal Tree ( 1975 ), use legal documents: Assize court trials, Quarter Sessions’ indictments, pardons, and remarks of judges at sentencing. Hobsbawm agreed that oral history could furnish the views of ordinary people about big events, but he did not see oral history interviews as a substitute for primary documentary sources. He would remain skeptical of oral history until, he said, historians understood what goes wrong in personal memory as well as what goes wrong in transmitting manuscripts: “Most oral history today is personal memory, which is a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts,” Hobsbawm (1997 , p. 206) warned.

With the exception of statistical analysis, alternative methods for writing history have not developed as imagined. Oral history has become a popular technique for writing the history of criminology, and this has featured the lives of prominent men who founded the discipline. Gene Carte initiated an oral history project in 1971 to explore the legacy of August Vollmer, founder of the American Society of Criminology. The project recorded interviews (conducted by Jane Howard Robinson) with the V-men, a circle of former Berkeley police officers who knew Vollmer as “chief,” and established degree programs at universities. Vollmer’s generation included remarkable women who contributed to criminology, including Edith Abbott, Chloe Owings, Eleanor Glueck, and Frances Glessner Lee, but the oral history initiative started with men. John Laub (1984a) interviewed prominent men who established criminology as an academic discipline between 1930 and 1960 , including Leslie Wilkins, Edwin Lemert, Thorsten Sellin, Albert Cohen, and Lloyd Ohlin. Gray Cavender shifted the exclusive focus on the men of criminology in his oral history interviews for the American Journal of Criminal Justice during the 1990s. Along with Albert Cohen and Jerome Skolnick, he also interviewed Meda Chesny-Lind and Coramae Richey Mann.

Laub (1984b) did encourage criminologists to record oral history interviews with judges, probation officers, police, and other professionals to understand the development of criminal justice, as well as delinquents and criminals to compare experiences across time (and see Laub & Smith, 1995 ). Criminologists have taken Laub’s advice, and some notable histories have appeared. The history of policing Britain has benefited from several oral histories ( Brogden, 1991 ; Cockcroft, 2005 ; Weinberger, 1995 ). In her study of colonial policing, Georgina Sinclair interviewed hundreds of former colonial police constables, and they shared their experiences at the end of the British Empire. The interviews also opened up a trove of materials in private collections—diaries, letters, memoirs, handbooks, and memorabilia—to supplement the records available at the National Archives in London ( Sinclair, 2006 ).

The most likely place for criminologists to encounter material culture has been museum studies, a topic that has emerged in criminology only in the past decade. Historians have examined museums of criminology, police museums, and decommissioned prisons now serving as tourist sites ( Knepper, 2019 ). The focus, however, has not been using the artifacts, whether burglars’ tools or prisoner-made handcrafts, to uncover the experiences of people from below. Rather, these studies have been devoted to deciphering the top-down message of government power ( Walby & Piché, 2015 ; Welch, 2012 ).

Material culture can provide a bottom-up or, rather, “ground-up” view of institutions. Eleanor Casella, a specialist in historical archaeology, directed excavations at the Ross Factory in Tasmania, an institution for female convicts shipped to Australia during the 19th century . The solitary cells had no floor, except for compacted earth, and from this soil, she recovered a surprising number of artifacts that could only have arrived through infractions of factory regulations. These illicit materials included clay tobacco pipes and glass alcohol bottles. Contrary to the image of women prisoners as docile, these suggest the role of women in resistance to colonial rule. In addition, the excavations unearthed decorative shell and copper buttons, which were not provided as part of factory uniforms. Rather, as suggested by documentary accounts of smuggling and trade within the prison, these items functioned as “tokens” allowing the women to purchase luxuries and temptations. “The female convicts incarcerated within the Ross Female Factory inhabited a complex social world,” Casella (2001 , p. 65) concluded, “a cultural landscape of shifting allies and enemies, of fluid opportunities, and of carefully guarded places.”

Social Science History

Rather than describe events during a particular period, the new social history wanted to recover the experience of the masses. To understand social structure and change over time, social historians imported techniques from social science, particularly statistical techniques used in demography, geography, and urban studies. During the late 1970s, when historians gained access to mainframe computers, a few pioneers began to examine crime trends. By the mid-1980s, when desktop computers became available along with software packages for statistical analysis, social science history took off in criminology ( Aebi & Linde, 2016 ).

One of the most intriguing statistical questions to emerge has been long-term crime trends. In 1981 , Ted Robert Gurr assembled evidence of a decline in homicide rates in England between the 13th century and 20th century . For the earliest centuries, he calculated homicide rates for years or decades from the work of English historians gleaned from coroners’ reports and court records. From the beginning of the 19th century , he incorporated statistics from official records. It was a startling finding. Gurr’s empirical data contradicted the impression of a “peaceful past, violent present” and sparked a blaze of methodological issues among criminologists and historians ( Gurr, 1981 ).

As similar analyses from other parts of Europe accumulated, the consensus accepted a “great decline” in violence. The conversation turned to what might be behind this trend. In The Civilization of Crime ( Johnson & Monkkonen, 1996 ), Eric Johnson and Eric Monkkenon favored Nobert Elias’s “civilizing process” as the best theoretical explanation. But a few years later, Monkkonen had buyer’s remorse and decided the statistical methodology needed more work: “Should we conclude that the empirical question is now settled? That a ‘violent past, peaceful present’ describes our world? Should we move on to other questions? I believe not” ( Monkkonen, 2001 , p. 6). Monkkonen worried about generalizing from atypical study sites, homicides missing from the database, uncertain population estimates, and the impact of medical intervention and advanced weapons. Others continue to believe that violence has declined over the centuries and that Elias’s theory explains it ( Eisner, 2003 ; Spierenburg, 2008 ). In 2011 , psychologist Steven Pinker decided the civilizing process, when combined with evolutionary psychology, explained the long-term decline in violence ( Pinker, 2011 ).

But doubts about the methodology have not gone away. Roth (2018) has declared, “The evidence for a long-term decline in murder is not there.” He faults criminologists and historians for failing to measure the correlates associated with the civilizing process: state formation, commercial activity, feminization, cosmopolitanism, and rationality. The advocates of the great decline have not measured these forces, so they do not demonstrate them at work, whether in the decline or retreats from the civilizing process ( Roth, 2018 , p. 99). Gerd Schwerhoff and colleagues also doubt that a great decline in violence has taken place in Europe. They, too, question the homicide figures and the population estimates. “All in all, what seems to be an extensive set of data at first sight, reveals itself as a hodgepodge of the most varied fragmentary information” ( Schwerhoff et al., 2021 , p. 20). They also flag a methodological decision by researchers who believe in the great decline—that is, to regard low figures for early periods as incomplete, favor high figures, and skew the overall results.

Elias’s theory “matches the data so well” because the data are the statistics. Historians always work with limited information, but for those engaged in statistical analysis of long-term crime trends, one limitation is self-imposed: The answer to every question about uncertain data or inadequate technique is more data, better technique. Eisner (2011) suggested the usefulness of historical archaeology. Understanding the kind of weapons available across the centuries would help answer at least one of Monkkonen’s questions about the trend, but Eisner (2014) returns to the statistical data to analyze the weapons issue. (Specialization in research methods does limit triangulation in historical research in criminology; historians who know archival research return to their documents, and historians who know statistical methods return their software.) And, in order for the civilizing thesis to be the answer, those who believe in a great decline need to adjust the question. It becomes necessary to assume that homicide offers an index of “criminal violence” in general, including victimizations such as rape, but overlooks “political violence,” such as rape, committed during the wars of the 20th century . Given Monkkonen’s (2001) commitment to statistical reasoning, he avoided even commenting on this issue.

The civilizing process, as Elias talked about it, is a top-down explanation for the great decline—the intervention of elites and the extension of government control. The statistics reflect the behavior of ordinary people, but ordinary people increasingly behave in a nonviolent way due to the influence of the ideas and practices of elites and authorities. Is there a bottom-up explanation? Opportunity theory within criminology proposes that the behavior of ordinary people determines the possibilities for crime. Steps taken by the masses for self-protection, security, and prevention regulate the amount and type of criminal activity. In addition, technological, cultural, social, and other changes create openings or chances for criminal victimization ( Van Dijk, 2008 ).

One of the long-term changes is the management of darkness ( Ekirch, 2005 ). In the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, people struggled to keep themselves safe at night—they tried “shutting in,” carrying weapons, and organizing a watch. Or finding a source of light. For wealthy households, candlelight would ward off burglars. Those lower down would have settled for rushlight made from kitchen fat or prepared themselves to face thieves in the darkness ( Ekirch, 2005 , pp. 90–117). The technology for lighting varies across the centuries, from candles, to oil lamps, to gas and electricity, but also by region and social class. Understanding what ordinary people did to protect themselves, as evidenced by documentary sources as well as material culture, may provide a bottom-up understanding of long-term trends in homicide.

The Cultural Turn

Within a decade or so, social history claimed the center of historical writing. But by the 1980s, the “cultural turn” was already under way. The “new cultural history” brought new priorities and opportunities for writing about the past and had an impact on historiography as large as the social history movement ( Hunt, 1989 ). No one played a more dramatic role in bringing the cultural turn to criminology than Michel Foucault.

Discipline and Punish ( 1979 ) incorporated archival documents, and initially, criminologists read it as a contribution to the emerging social history of the prison ( Foucault 1979 ). But Foucault used archival materials as no historian would. When he wrote about Bentham’s panopticon, he had more in mind than the scheme of an eccentric Englishman. The panopticon design represented the way social control was diffused throughout modern life. Prisons, police, law, and government had no special importance. Scientific thinking offered no secure route to knowledge—there was no place to stand outside “the all-seeing eye.” The architecture of power and control could be found everywhere: in other social institutions, other relationships; within language, within thinking itself. The clue to Foucault’s project turned out not to be in the subtitle but in the introduction. Foucault was not really interested in “the birth of the prison”; he was writing a “history of the present” ( Foucault, 1979 ).

Within the next few decades, history of the present seemed to be everywhere in criminology. It offered a kind of analytical or theoretical history that avoided the taint of undertheorized descriptions of the past. Because it was about the present, it was relevant: a glimpse of the future. History of the present multiplied the possible sources—official or unofficial, fiction or nonfiction, primary or secondary—it did not matter. All texts expressed language that could be disassembled through “discourse analysis” to reveal the mechanics of power—legal and medical reports ( Shapiro, 1996 ), newspaper stories about murder ( Walkowitz, 1992 ), and detective novels ( Miller, 2008 ). The sources did not even need to be documents; a history of the present could be written about tools and gadgets ( Horn, 2006 ) and photographs ( Carney, 2015 ).

David Garland has emerged as the preeminent interpreter of Foucault. Garland’s analytical style and elegant language, combined with use of archival materials, succeeded in bringing Foucault into the historiography of punishment and criminology. His approach has been to “sociologize Foucault’s philosophical arguments” ( Garland, 2019b , p. 640). In Punishment and Welfare ( 1985 ), Garland used a range of primary documents to conclude that between 1890 and 1914 , the British government instituted the power to punish within the modern welfare state ( Garland, 1985a ). Garland intended, as he explains in the preface to the 2018 edition, “to follow Michel Foucault’s lead and write ‘a history of the present’ uncovering the political and ideological struggles that have given rise to modern penal practice” ( Garland, 2019a , p. 269). In his articles on the history of criminology, Garland borrowed from Foucault to identify the Lombrosian project, the criminal as “other,” and to identify the prison as a “surface of emergence” for criminology, a disciplinary science ( Garland, 1985b , 1988 ). He built on Foucault’s genealogy to show how Lombrosian criminology had influenced courts and prisons in Britain ( Garland, 2002 ).

Four decades after Foucault introduced history of the present, Garland found it useful to explain what Foucault meant by it. Although Foucault was interested in history, he invented his own form of inquiry; initially, he called it archaeology , but later he used the term genealogy . Archaeology was his term for digging into the past to uncover discursive traces of historical periods and reassembling them, like layers or strata, each with its own form of discourse ( Garland, 2014 , p. 369). Foucault understood the past as an assemblage of historical eras, each with a signature pattern of thought and conceptual language. He imagined changing eras or periods of history in a way that bears a “superficial” resemblance to the concept of “paradigm shift” in Thomas Kuhn’s history of science ( Garland, 2014 , p. 370). Discipline and Punish introduced the genealogical strategy of using historical research to disturb contemporary conceptions and examine the change brought about by archaeologies. Genealogy of knowledge shows “descent” and “emergence” and how contingencies of these processes continue to shape the present ( Garland, 2014 , p. 371). If Foucault seemed to have something to say about actual historical events, this amounts to a “category mistake” that places Foucault’s project on the shelf alongside “conventional historical research” ( Garland, 2014 , p. 374). Foucault remains a philosopher, and history of the present is a philosophical idea: “Genealogy is relatively uninterested in the specific intentions and meanings of historical actors” ( Garland, 2014 , p. 381).

Is a history of the present, even the sociologized version, enough? Linebaugh (1992) observes that one can critique what the authorities of a previous era were doing from a perspective in the present—what the institutions they created have become (mass imprisonment)—to show how mistaken their view was. But it is impossible to write about punishment without understanding the experience of those subject to it—to appreciate that what the authorities believed they were doing and what ordinary people felt about this were not the same thing ( Linebaugh, 1992 ). In her study of prisons for women in 19th-century United States, Nicole Rafter (1985) , demonstrated the importance of understanding not only the decisions about their confinement made by men but also the experiences of the women themselves. Using registers for prisons in several states, she built case studies to discover differences for Black women and White women, as well as regional differences across the South, Midwest, and West. Rafter wrote about “people who are neglected,” marginalized subpopulations of women, those with disabilities, and racial/ethnic minorities, within marginalized populations, including prisoners, asylum inmates, and crime victims. She challenged the conclusions that historians—even the revisionists—had made about punishment in general from their observations of model institutions created for men ( Rafter & Farrell, 2015 ).

One of the many studies inspired by Rafter’s work, Knepper (1992) tells about the women confined at the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma between 1876 and 1909 . The prison register records the names of about 3,000 men and 28 women. The register can be interpreted as a text that reveals the logic of confinement. Prison authorities inspected the bodies of incoming prisoners within an anthropometric understanding of criminal identification and made brief notations in the register. The Lombrosian project reached the western frontier of the United States, a moment that affirms the institutional origins of criminal anthropology ( Garland, 1985 , p. 115). The register can also be interpreted as an archival document that reveals something about those confined—about the women themselves and their experience of frontier society. Comparing the notations for men and women, a pattern emerges. The men are much more likely to have tattoos; the women are much more likely to have scars. Jesús Chacón, a 19-year-old woman sent to Yuma in 1902 for arson, had a scar on her forehead above her left eye, a scar on her right shoulder, and scars on her back, neck, and left forearm ( Knepper, 1992 , p. 240). Her body recorded victimization, violence, and abuse—continuities in women’s experience between past and present that remain unaltered by the “critical junctures” and “exemplary moments” in punishment for men.

The Digital Revolution

During the 1990s, historical methods in criminology took another turn. Digitization expanded yet again the range of source material, and Internet-based search and retrieval increased the possibilities. It was, Barry Godfrey (2012) explains, “something of a revolution” in sources of empirical data. Mountains of traditional sources—court registers, coroners records, prison registers, politics statistics—became available to anyone with access to the Internet, along with an avalanche of primary sources—contemporary newspapers; illustrations, broadsides, and cartoons; autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries; and films, photographs, and plans ( Godfrey, 2012 , pp. 164–165).

Godfrey helped create the premiere digital archive for historical research in criminology. The Digital Panopticon began in 2000 with a project led by Robert Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock to digitize the proceedings of London’s Old Bailey. The project assembled on a single, searchable, publicly available online platform the records of criminals convicted at the Old Bailey between late 18th and the late 19th centuries. Following the launch in 2003 of the Old Bailey Online, subsequent projects linked the court records with a wide range of resources ( Hitchcock & Shoemaker, 2006 ). The Digital Panopticon extracted trial reports for the 110,000 people convicted at the Old Bailey from 1780 to 1868 , the population from which the legal and penal authorities selected convicts transported to Australia. The expanded project brought 50 data sets with “cradle-to-grave” information about 100,000 convict lives: criminal registers, transportation registers and convict indents, records of convicts arriving in Australia, prisons and hulk registers, and prison licenses (parole). The project also linked civil records—specifically, 19th-century British census material, along with records of births, marriages, and deaths—and further linked to databases that had already been digitized by commercial sources, including British Newspapers 1600–1900 , House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, and the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera. By 2017 , the Digital Panopticon had brought together 4 million records pertaining to some 250,000 people ( Shoemaker, 2019 ; Ward & Williams, 2016 ).

There have been technological innovations in the history of archival research. Beginning in the 1950s, microfilm brought an “active information system” to card-catalog searches and retrieval of material from stacks. Microfilm promised an explosion of archival sources given the ability for compact storage of bulky paper materials. But the speed and scale of digitization, combined with Internet access, have brought opportunities and questions to historical research in criminology that had not been encountered before. The advent of the Internet made it “possible to research and write credible, evidence-based history on many topics using exclusively online sources” ( Hitchcock, 2013 , p. 9), not to mention publishing the results of that research in electronic journals, blogs, podcasts, webinars, and so on.

The online archive offers “digital affordances,” as Hitchcock (2017) puts it, which may disrupt the writing of crime history in the way Internet shopping disrupted brick-and-mortar businesses. It allows for changing the questions historians ask, as well as the method for finding answers. The online archive reverses the traditional process of historical inquiry. It is a “data-first” approach in which the historian constructs a data set that leads to a particular conclusion rather than stating an argument and arranging the documentary evidence to support it. The online archive enables the possibility for “connected history” ( Godfrey, 2017 , p. 41). Crime history appears to be uniquely positioned to take advantage of “big data.” This includes transnational connections, as well as links across time periods and disciplinary boundaries. Shoemaker, Godfrey, and other founders of the Digital Panopticon have also identified limitations or dangers of using online archives. Instant data are not necessarily a good thing. Traditional research on location at archives affords time to think. Melding documentary material from diverse archives into a single “digital product” can make this material difficult to interpret. The vastness of sources available online, combined with the uncertainty of algorithms used by online search engines, makes riddling the vast “digital landfill” nearly overwhelming ( Godfrey, 2017 ; Showmaker, 2019 ).

The online archive raises new possibilities for “history from below.” By joining up archival materials, it is possible to glimpse lives of individuals who previously existed as names in disparate bodies of records. “This telling of life stories of otherwise poor and marginalized people,” Shoemaker (2019) writes,

has given new life to the historiographical approach of “history from below,” which has been carried out by a number of historians and criminologists, and stand as a strong counterpart to the histories of the privileged which historians so often write. (p. 7)

Or, as Godfrey (2017) says, linking data sets across national, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries “could position crime historians at the forefront of the new ‘history from below’ paradigm” (p. 41). Institutional records provide scraps of information about particular individuals, which makes it difficult know much about them. By collecting pieces of description from multiple institutions, the Digital Panopticon makes it possible to assemble a “life grid” that identifies major life events and reconstruct the life course of forgotten individuals ( Watkins, 2020 ).

In 2019 , the Digital Panopticon added a collection of convict tattoos, which does provide a means of understanding convicts’ outlook, derived from the ways they choose to mark their bodies ( Shoemaker, 2019 , p. 13). Tepperman’s (2019 ) study of convict tattoos during the 1920s and 1930s, gathered from physical and online archives of prisons across the United States, reveals expressions of masculinity, sentimentality, and nationalism, as well as affinities with social institutions, most often military organizations and trade unions. The tattoos suggest “common lived experiences” and identification with a working-class culture, including sailors, soldiers, traders, and laborers. But for the most part, Shoemaker acknowledges, the digital lives on display are limited to interactions with institutions, courts, and prisons. The online records yield very little about the convicts’ families and friends, their work and leisure activities, and their interests and passions ( Shoemaker, 2019 , p. 13).

Katherine Roscoe (2022) interrogates the colonial archive. While data can be extracted for various purposes, the view is from the metropole looking out at the periphery. Digital lives are not the color of water but the color of poor White Europeans—the “cradle-to-grave” aspect being records of working-class people from “their British roots to Australian fates.” She has built a database of prisoners on Cockatoo Island, Sydney’s Colonial Prison. Inmates included Aboriginal, African American, Afro Caribbean, Black British, Chinese, and Southeast Asian migrants alongside White convicts and their descendants. In building her data set, she realized how “many people of colour slip between the gaps of digital-record linkage.” Various misspellings or nicknaming of Indigenous Chinese, African, or Indian names, together with scant recording of their birthplace or ship, makes them difficult to find when traveling across databases. Recordkeeping practices vary considerably across institutions, so that they fall into the cracks opened up by virtual spaces. Large-scale digitization projects will replicate their omission due to limitations in keyword searches and use of the optical character recognition method of producing online sources. Roscoe (2022) explains that “decolonizing digital crime history is challenging because the changes have to be structural, not surface level” (p. 172).

Historical Criminology

Within the past few years, the phrase historical criminology has started to appear with greater frequency ( Churchill et al., 2021 ; Yeomans et al., 2021 ). Historical criminology can be defined as using archival research to address current crime and criminal justice issues ( Bosworth, 2001 ; Knepper & Scicluna, 2010 ; Lawrence, 2009 ). Lawrence (2009) refers to historical criminology as “research which incorporates historical primary sources while addressing present-day debates and practices in the criminal justice field” (p. 495). Churchill (2017) proposes that historical criminology is less about a commitment to archival research than to “think historically.” Historical criminology represents an “engagement with concepts of historical time . . . encompassing studies pursued for various purposes and via different methods” ( Churchill, 2017 , p. 379). Tepperman (2022) expresses an essential truth when he writes that historical criminologists are those who accept the “dual purpose of speaking meaningfully to both the criminological past and present” (p. 2).

Historical criminology would be well positioned to take on several projects—to begin with, the “criminology of time” ( Knepper, 2014 ) or “plural history” ( Churchill, 2017 ). Churchill (2017) has emphasized the usefulness of breaking away from the singular, linear conception of time divided into discrete periods. He points to the conception of time within the work of Reinhart Koselleck, who envisioned “sediments or layers of time.” These layers—long term, midterm, and short term—interact through structures of repetition or recurrence . Events are singular occurrences that surprise those who experience them. But this singularity unfolds historically in recurrent ways recorded by accounts of singular experience by previous generations ( Koselleck, 2018 , pp. 3–9). Fernand Braudel also imagined three levels of time, or history moving at three speeds. In his history of the Mediterranean, he saw the natural environment, the mountains, deserts, and sea, as constraints on behavior that persist across generations. The behaviors produce the “almost immobile history” of geographical time. He described the “slowly rhythmic history . . . of groups and groupings” shaped by long-term trends in trade and transport, empire, and warfare. This he referred to as social time. The “history of events” unfolds in individual time; it has “the dimension of their anger, dreams and delusions” ( Braudel, 1980 , pp. 3–5).

Unique events in the history of crime can be understood as turning points, or moments of change. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought a rise in property crime across Western Europe during the 1990s. The end of the wall connected two parts of the continent that differed dramatically in wealth and material and created a substantial market for stolen goods in Central and Eastern Europe ( Aebi & Linde, 2010 , pp. 266–267). Other events repeat themselves, or recur, suggesting the need to understand persistence or continuity over time. There were some 5,600 murders in Chicago between 1875 and 1920 , but in the typical case, a man killed another man, most often in a drunken brawl. Overall, the murder rate increased during this period of time, and whatever the etiology of this behavior—culture, geography, time, or technology—the same murder repeats itself again and again ( Adler, 2003 , p. 553).

Another project for historical criminology would be memory. Among historians, memory has become an important subject in the past few decades, an extension of the cultural turn in the 1980s. Historians have developed a conceptual vocabulary for memory studies and engaged in debates about the meaning of this language ( Berger & Niven, 2014 ). Within criminology, serious work in this area has scarcely begun. Memory, as Nicole Rafter pointed out, is vital for criminology. But where criminology needs an active process of recollection, there is silence ( Brown & Rafter, 2013 ; Rafter, 2010 ). The work of Maurice Halbwachs provides a valuable starting point. In Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire ( 1925 ), translated as On Collective Memory ( Halbwachs, 1992 ), Halbwachs proposed that individuals belong to social groups whose coherence and identity rely on a shared view of the past. Memory resides in the minds of individual members of a group, but personal recollections can only be communicated to others through social frames that shape individual memory.

The return of the crime museum has led criminologists to explore cultural sites of memory. Every year, millions of tourists visit police museums throughout the world, from Buenos Aires to Seattle, Mexico City to Malta, and sites of former prisons, including Alcatraz Island, Robben Island, and Port Arthur. The Hans Gross museum at Graz reopened in 2003 and the Lombroso Museum at Turin in 2009 . In 2015 , Scotland Yard’s Black Museum staged a public exhibition—the first ever—at the Museum of London ( Knepper, 2019 ). Wilson (2008) , in her examination of prison tourism in Australia, has identified the ways these sites promote a public memory consistent with the government’s view of these institutions, reinforced via former prison guards who serve as tour guides. Displays of uniforms, gadgets, and equipment in police museums reinforce the “history of progress” view of the past and portray the police function in society as essential and beneficial. Other locations represent sites of “contested memory.” Ystehede (2016) observes the ways in museum exhibits have become the focus of political conflicts, and proposals for monuments at the sites of criminal victimization have invoked concerns about commercialization.

Historical criminology could also engage, or reengage, with archival research following the lead of microhistory. In the 1950s, Braudel advocated statistical analysis to grasp long periods of time. He sent historians into archives in search of time-series data and, if they could not be found, to build a data set from the archives. He used the word microstorie as an insult, but Ginzburg and colleagues adopted the term and gave it new meaning. Microhistorians counter quantification and abstraction of historical inquiry though microscopic analysis. The smallest events can provide far-reaching conclusions ( Tepperman, 2021 , p. 147). The Braudel–Ginzburg exchange repeated itself, so to speak, in the 2000s. The advocates of statistical analyses of long-term homicide trends sought to explain why high rates persisted in the United States, contrary to the great decline for Europe. Spierenburg (2006) supposed that democracy arrived “too early” in American history and that the civilizing thesis remained the leading theory. Dale (2006) took the microhistory route. The legal system in the United States has so many local, state, and regional variations that it is difficult to generalize. She focused on two South Carolina murder cases, in a jurisdiction notorious for its “culture of violence.” She wrote about extralegal justice, punishment outside the legal system, and a legal culture in which acquittal meant shame and ostracism for the defendants.

During the 1970s, the new social history brought to criminology the opportunity for understanding crime and criminal justice in the past from the bottom up. Rather than reading the views of reformers, administrators, and other “great men,” the social history revolution encouraged an understanding of convicts, women, inmates, and urban poor. To do this, it would be necessary to explore alternatives to traditional historical research with documents in archives: to pursue oral history, material culture studies, and statistical analyses. Although historians in criminology have recorded oral history interviews, analyzed museum collections, and, to greater extent, carried out statistical analyses of historical data, the prevailing view has been top down. Alternative methods have been used to critique elite views rather than learn about ordinary lives. The cultural turn of the 1980s accelerated this situation. Those inspired to do histories of the present have devoted their full attention to the aims of the authorities and how the institutions they created have delivered on their design.

But the situation seems to be changing. The digital revolution of the 1990s offers a new possibility for a history from below, for learning about the everyday lives of the system-impacted, the marginalized, and the victimized. Big data can reveal small lives in the past. And in recent years, the interest in defining and developing historical criminology has renewed interest in microhistory. Microhistory has yielded knowledge about those in low places and a glimpse at the lives of ordinary people affected by criminal victimization and the response to it, even if it relies on documents. The basis for archival research, conjectural knowledge, represents a low form of knowledge, a way of knowing common to those at the floor of society.

Further Reading

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Truth and Method in Southern Criminology

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• Published: 01 September 2021
• Volume 29 , pages 451–467, ( 2021 )

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What does it mean to “do” southern criminology? What does this entail and what demands should it place on us as criminologists ethically and methodologically? This article addresses such questions through a form dialogue between the Global North and the Global South. At the center of this dialogue is a set of questions about ethical conduct in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding in human relations. These develop into a conversation that engages South Asian scholars working at the forefront of critical social science, history and theory with a foundational text of European hermeneuticist theory and practice, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method , published in 1960. Out of this exercise in communication across culture, histories and knowledge practices emerges a new kind of dialogue and a new way of thinking about ethical practice in criminology. To give such abstractions a concrete reference point, the article illustrates their possibilities and tensions through a case study of penal reform and the question of whether so-called “failed” Northern penal methods—like the prison—should be exported to the Global South. The article thus works dialogically back and forth through these scholars’ accounts of ethical conduct, research practice, the weight of history, and the work of theory with a very concrete and common criminological context in sight. The result is what might be understood as a norm of ethical engagement and an epistemology of dialogue.

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Introduction

This article raises questions about how Northern or Global North-oriented criminologists might think about the Global South and, in their work, try to join in finding just futures there. In terms of what this might involve, I define “work” broadly to include advocacy, discussions, engagements, meetings, professional relationships, research and visits. In this context, I use the phrase “just futures” to refer to the goal of finding fair and satisfactory solutions to problems of order—again, broadly defined, from illegalities to social wrongs and even to ruptures of cosmological order—as they appear in those parts of the world that have been mostly invisible to mainstream criminology. I also use the term, “just futures,” as a foil for thinking through some of the personal challenges faced by criminologists raised or trained within Northern epistemic and ontological traditions as they attempt to work justly and ethically in Southern places, in Southern worlds, and in engagement with Southerners and their lives. As such, this article joins a growing number of efforts to connect criminology to broader conceptions of ethical conduct and to reflect, through an ethical lens, on Global North-Global South and postcolonial praxis (Blaustein 2016 , 2017 ; Cunneen 2018 ; George et al. 2020 ; Walters 2016 ). It dovetails with approaches such as Jarrett Blaustein’s ( 2017 : 374) “ethical self-checklist that is designed to help researchers achieve a reflexive praxis” when “abroad” in the Global South. But it also goes much further than this aid-memoire approach by developing, for what I think is the first time (cf. Reiman 1979 ), an ethical account of the how and why of our conduct as criminologists and by suggesting the generative, discipline-expanding opportunities that Global North-Global South praxis offers. In doing so, the article moves beyond prevailing visions of ethics in Southern and postcolonial criminology by distinguishing political claims that are often framed as ethical injunctions—such as that we should not (re)impose colonial logics upon peoples and communities of the Global South (it would be unethical to do so)—from an individual-level and formal ethical account of conduct that is grounded in Kantian morality’s demand for all people(s) to be treated as fully human. As such, while grounded in the concerns of southern criminology, the implications and relevance of this approach extend to the whole discipline of criminology and, indeed, more widely to any circumstances where social scientists work in milieux marked by difference, hierarchy, imbalances of power and the like.

So, what might constitute “ethical” conduct in such circumstances? While cautioning that greater finesse and elaboration will emerge as this article progresses, I proceed, at this point, with an elementary definition that emerges from the second formulation of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: we must never treat another (that is, another person, another group of people) simply as a means , for that person/those people must always, as human(s), be an end in himself/herself/themselves. As I illustrate below, this seemingly uncontentious proposition in fact presents significant challenges to social science methodologies and to typical modes of Global North-Global South or postcolonial engagement. How, or why, might this be so? To illustrate, I use a case study developed from work I have undertaken with South Asian colleagues. I discuss it only in general terms with respect to its specific location, but the question of location is not critical because the problem itself—penal reform—is common across the Global South. The questions it presents to us are, in many ways, not new—until, that is, they are posed in connection with the question of justice, itself, and of what it means to work ethically as a criminologist. What I argue is that debates about whether it is good or bad to export so-called “failed” penal technologies like the prison take a different tone when the target of these Global Northern exports is a state in the Global South (cf. Graham and Robertson 2021 ; Jones and Newburn 2007 ). Implicit in the debate is the matter of our judgment and thus how we assess the quality of these penal approaches. Here, I propose that just practice requires us to attend to the ethical implications of our own judgment. In addition, I suggest we do so through a form of reflexivity that recognizes the double-sided character of well-meaning judgment and that raises awareness of the delicate line dividing well-meaning judgment from practices of domination.

The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. First, I examine penal reform in the Global South. There is a small but long-standing criminological literature on this topic—a point at which critical, progressive criminology meets the globalization of penal reform initiatives, often tied to narratives and strategies of “modernization” and “development.” Second, and moving into the sphere of ethics, I engage with the work of the German hermeneutical philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, primarily through his text Truth and Method ( 1960 ). Gadamer’s work has been influential in many spheres, including in the Global South. The productive engagement with his ideas that has occurred there constitutes the third and fourth part of this article, but I will begin here with an outline of Gadamer’s key arguments and, in particular, his account of how forms of progressive welfare work—which takes in much of what criminology does—may slide easily into practices of domination. In parts three and four, two visions from South Asia of how ethics and history shape knowledge under conditions of hierarchical domination are introduced. In the first, Guru and Sarukkai ( 2012 ) debate questions of experience and theory with specific reference to India’s Dalits—an oppressed segment of India’s population known also to some caste Hindus as “untouchables.” After a discussion of Guru and Sarukkai’s understanding of domination, ethics and hierarchies, I engage with the work of Prathama Banerjee, Aditya Nigam and Rakesh Pandey ( 2016 ), who broaden and develop these ideas to consider “the work of theory” and the conditions under which forms of knowledge freed from hierarchical domination might emerge. Finally, I draw all of this together by returning to Gadamer, blending ideas flowing from these South Asian dialogues with his own notion of “dialogue as method.” I conclude by suggesting how criminologists might find within these quite disparate traditions of thinking what I term a “norm of ethical engagement” and an “epistemology of dialogue” suitable for a southern criminology.

Penal Reform in the Global South

About 85% of the world’s population lives in the Global South (UN 2018 ) and much of what we refer to today as the “Global South” has a long history of former colonial occupation. One cannot identify a precise date on which formal European imperialism ended and new and notionally independent nation-states emerged: decolonization of parts of Latin America began in the early nineteenth century and continued through the twentieth century in South Asia. In the 1960s, Africa experienced a tidal wave of decolonization and, in 1960 alone, for example, seventeen new nation-states came into existence on the continent. Yet, the retreating colonial powers and their forms of rule that spread globally since the discovery of the “New World” in the late-fifteenth century left myriad residues. Among the least loved of them all was and continues to be the prison (Dikotter and Brown 2007 ), which retains a certain, often decrepit, presence in the institutional architecture of states of the Global South. This crumbling presence is often shackled to an equally creaky judicial system also of colonial origin. To take three South Asian states as examples, the inertia of courts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan can partly explain the fact that in 2015, individuals on trial comprised 74%, 67% and 69% of these countries’ prison populations, respectively (UNODC 2020 ). Not only are these rates high, but prisoners often languish in “undertrial” custody for years. Surely, then, these must be sites ripe for reform and for the transfer of some better knowledge of “how to do things.” And, indeed, they have been subject to a substantial amount of such advice.

These circumstances beg the following questions: how should Northern or Global North-oriented criminologists respond? What role should they play in the export, transfer or translation of Northern penal approaches, based on their supposedly greater experience and more efficient and developed models, to countries that lack them or where they are “weak” or “underdeveloped” or simply crumbling? Of course, these are not new questions, nor do their answers rest solely with those who study penal systems (Bowling 2011 ; Walklate and Fitz-Gibbon 2018 ). Nor is it a purely an issue of technical knowledge because there are clear threads linking criminology’s self-conception with the way it approaches the transfer and communication of its knowledge beyond its metropolitan academies (Carrabine et al. 2020 ). Indeed, the discipline has a history of responding to these questions since at least the time of Clinard and Abbott’s Crime in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective ( 1973 )—a study and proposed modernization thesis for Uganda made just a few years after its independence. Critical responses to such advice-giving began to emerge not long after that. Early examples appear in a collection edited by Colin Sumner, Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment ( 1982 ), which subjected the modernization approach to various forms of fairly negative appraisal. Probably the clearest critique of Global North–Global South “transfer” was made by Stanley Cohen in an essay, “Western crime control models in the Third World: Benign or malignant?” (in Cohen 1988 ). Thirty years and thousands of well-meaning penal reform programs later, that critical perspective continues to be advanced by criminologists. In the process, new terms have been coined to capture all the reforming and transforming activity, such as “penal aid” (Brisson-Bovin and O’Connor 2013 ), “penal humanitarianism” (Bosworth 2017 ; Lohne 2020 ) and “penal neo-colonialism” (Stambøl 2021 ). One recent example of this literature is an article by Deborah Drake, “Prisons and state building: Promoting “the fiasco of the prison” in a global context” ( 2018 ). In the parts below, I draw on Drake’s distillation of some of criminology’s progressive arguments as they are made in the context of penal reform in the Global South, but I use her work mainly for convenience as a particularly clear, spirited and contemporary articulation of a long-standing critical tradition of work within the discipline.

Drawing on this tradition of work, Drake ( 2018 : 11) summarizes that:

Prisons operate as repressive, unconstitutional spaces. They begin from the premise that the citizens they govern will not be afforded the same rights and freedoms as other social members. They stigmatise those they imprison, setting “them” apart from “us”. This function is reinforced by and, in turn, reinforces the principles of othering that are implicit in declared states of emergency and which accompany ideologies of security.

For Drake ( 2018 : 2), the persistent efforts to “create ‘better’ prison places and systems” are a sham and will only be brought to an end when everyone engages “more honestly” and tells “the ‘truth about prisons’.” What, indeed, is there to argue with her observation of a profound “disconnection between the assumed or imagined function of prisons … and their abject failure to consistently operate humanely or to fulfil their stated goals” (Drake 2018 : 2)? Recognizing the huge body of research that stands behind such conclusions and looking across a critical literature spanning almost forty years, what more is there to be said? Penal reform is a useful example for us here for this very reason.

To challenge the case against penal reform in the Global South is, I well recognize, not to be taken lightly for it also challenges one of the shibboleths of critical and progressive criminology. By extension, it also challenges the nature of progressive projects like southern criminology itself. My aim in doing so, in fact, has very little to do with the quality of what is said about prisons or other penal measures—whether they are good or bad—and is, instead, an intervention into the field of ethics, ethical conduct, and ethical practice that shines a light on the post-enlightenment tradition of progressive social movements and welfare work— something reflected in many varieties of criminology, including these critiques of penal reform.

The Ethics of Judgment: On Welfare Work and Domination

I am not aware of any studies that analyze how criminologists of different stripes regard and engage with the moral-ethical domain of their professional lives in different spheres of crime and justice-related work (though important intimations can be found in Cain ( 2000 )). But if the teaching of criminology—its courses, textbooks and the like—may be understood as, at least, drawing an outline of an emerging professional habitus, then we can presume that most of us engage with ethics in largely procedural terms. The moral imperative to do no harm, as taught to students, is instantiated for criminologists in a blizzard of ethics application forms and informing/disclosing statements. Within them will be found demands to identify “at risk” participant groups—for example, the young, the mentally infirm, those in hierarchical relationships to the researcher or recruiter (prisoners being a good example)—as well as risks to researchers. All the while, there is the need to keep a keen eye on litigation or reputational risks for the employing university. Jerry Johnstone ( 2005 : 62) notes of the British Social Research Association’s Ethical Guidelines that it even:

makes it quite clear that such codes emerged, less from a concern to provide serious ethical guidance to researchers genuinely troubled by some ethical dilemma, but rather from the need to meet new public and political demands upon large organizations that affect public well-being (such as universities, the police, providers of financial services, and providers of heath and social care, etc.)

The result of this bureaucratization of the most human of concerns—ethical conduct—is, as Jeff Ferrell ( 2011 : 67) has observed, “a disciplinary moral order beset by contradiction and inconsistency, both in conceptualization and in practice, and all of this only half-hidden behind professional protestations otherwise.”

When I speak of ethics, here, my concerns are far broader than the rulemaking, codifying and control of researcher conduct that is the subject of Johnson’s writing. The implications of what I discuss below are, at this point, at least, principally at the level of personal criminological practice. Discussing such practice, David Rodríguez Goyes ( 2019 : 63) has observed that from a southern green criminological perspective, “deep respect for ethical considerations has more to do with being conscious of structural conditions than with the fulfilment of protocols,” such as those just discussed. I agree, but my approach here differs in that it describes the ethical impacts of structural/hierarchical domination and, in so doing, attempts to articulate precisely how and why the deep respect for ethical considerations, and thus the demands it carries with it, should arise at all. My aim, therefore, is to address the question of whether elements of Northern penality that are judged within critical criminological circles to have “failed” or are otherwise problematic should be exported to the Global South, with an eye to the ethical implications of what that act of judging entails.

In doing so, I will begin with Gadamer’s Truth and Method ( 1960 ). How might Gadamer help us and how relevant is a mid-twentieth-century German hermeneuticist to criminologists looking south? It is worth noting that I did not come across Gadamer through a study of the European canon, but through the work of Indian writers to whom we will turn once the key contours of Gadamer’s thought have been established. Gadamer’s value, I suggest, is in breaking down Kant’s categorical imperative in a manner appropriate for those of us wishing to engage across boundaries of place and history, and thus seeking a form of ethical practice in pursuit of knowledge founded on understanding. Recall that in its second formulation, Kant’s injunction states that we must never treat another person—or other groups—or another people—simply as a means . For by dint of their humanity, they must always be an end in themselves . Gadamer makes sense of this by distinguishing three possible forms of relation between ourselves and another—each progressively stronger in ethical form and, so, more capable of satisfying Kant’s demand to treat others as fully human.

To begin, Gadamer proposes that the fundamental point of our connection with others may be understood as an I-Thou relationship. “A Thou is not an object,” he notes, because it “relates itself to us” and, in so doing, draws us into an ethical space (Gadamer 1960 /2013: 366). With one eye on social science methodologies, Gadamer observes that a first, and common, form of I-Thou relations is that where we try to determine typical behaviours of those around us and use that experience to make predictions about how specific groups or individuals will behave. Footnote 1 Think of risk prediction in criminology as an obvious example. For Gadamer, “this orientation towards the Thou is purely self-regarding and contradicts the moral definition of man” Footnote 2 given to us by Kant (Gadamer  1960 /2013: 367). In other words, in generating offender risk profiles, for example, we use others purely for our own purposes—predicting the threat they pose to us. This is the self-regarding stance, in Gadamer’s language. We might delve deeper into the ethical terrain of prediction but that is not my focus here and its manifold problems are already well known in criminology (Harcourt 2007 ).

A second form of I-Thou relation is more typical of Global North–Global South interactions, but it is here that things also become trickier for us. For in this second case, while we recognize the other—the Thou—as a person (or people), we continue to maintain the self-orientation that was offensive to ethical conduct in the prediction example. The paradigmatic case arises in a dialogue between I and Thou that we might imagine for present purposes to concern such matters as, perhaps, the merits or desirability of some penal form or technique. Typical of such dialogues is the various perspectives of the discussants. For example, one side argues that the prison is a fiasco and brings with it only problems, while the other side responds that existing prison capacity is limited, the infrastructure is crumbling, and that there is a need to redevelop and reform this penal space. The details of the points are not important. What is important is that the dialectic of the I-Thou relationship in this form enables us to reflect on the other’s claims. And that act of reflection, in turn, frequently inclines us to situate ourselves in the other’s position. From there, it may be a short step to feeling that we understand their position or, as we might say colloquially that we know “where [they’re] coming from” ( 1960 /2013: 314). For example, one might remark, “I understand your situation of an old and ‘unfit’ penal system and that penal reform would satisfy many demands you face.” Gadamer did not structure his argument with the postcolonial context of our present discussion in mind, yet the effect of this context is to further reinforce the claim he is about to make. Why? Because dialogues between the Global North and the Global South are almost always conditioned by the historicist presumption that Northern experience leads —that is, is temporally prior—to Southern “development” in a teleological story of progress through global historical time (Chakrabarty 2000 ). The “fiasco of the prison” is, after all, little more than a story of Northern experience. It is precisely this advanced experience that allows us to know that the other who calls for penal reform in the face of a crumbling system does not yet understand what he/she/they is/are wishing for and what he/she/they will bring upon himself/herself/themselves—which is, of course, the fiasco of the prison, imported, tropicalized.

Admonitions, such as “that international bodies, non‐government organisations (NGOs), state officials and scholars must engage more honestly with the ‘truth about prisons’” (Drake 2018 : 2) when dealing with the Global South, contain within them an important presumptive structure. It is that not only have we judged what is best (i.e., not more prisons) but that we also know what the other would decide were he/she/they to be fully informed of “the truth”—were he/she/they to know, in other words, what we know. In this way, we have, in a manner of speaking, “occupied” the other’s mind. And here is the nub of Gadamer’s argument. In this presumption, we claim “to understand the other better than the other understands himself” ( 1960 /2013: 367). It is worthwhile at this point listening to Gadamer ( 1960 /2013: 368) explain how this slides quickly into a relationship of domination:

By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one robs his claims of their legitimacy. In particular, the dialectic of charitable or welfare work operates in this way, penetrating all relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate. The claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person's claim at a distance. We are familiar with this from the teacher-pupil relationship, an authoritative form of welfare work. In these reflective forms, the dialectic of the I-Thou relation becomes more clearly defined.

How should we respond? Must we cast aside our good intentions and knowledge of dangers that, with right reason, the other would recognize? Must we be allowed to step into the void our own experience anticipates? Is there anything to be done? The answer, for Gadamer and I think for us, too, as criminologists, is yes, but it requires dispensing with the self-regard that poisons the dialectic that we have just considered. The problem for ethical criminological practice that Gadamer’s work poses is that well-meaning judgment—of, for example, what should or should not be exported to the South, or what caveats or health warnings really must be attached—often reduces to a form of mastery over another. To anticipate now conclusions that will be reached later in the article, I note that none of this aims to shut down communication—nothing in this requires that we should be silent or advocates a “do nothing” or “say nothing” approach. What it does do is invite us to reassess our normal modes—of how we communicate, how we learn and come to know—and, in so doing, to behave more reflexively. I will return to all this in a few moments. For now, though, and in the reflexive spirit that I am encouraging here, I want to pause my engagement with Gadamer to consider how his ideas might make sense across cultures. In particular, I want to check that they do not instantiate the very Global North-Global South knowledge domination I draw on them to repudiate.

Domination and the Ethics of Social Science Research: The Case of India’s Dalits

A particularly fruitful engagement with Gadamer’s ideas can be found in India, which is, in fact, where I first came upon them. Scholarship there on research and ethics within a South Asian society, yet in contexts affected in myriad and complex ways by dominance and hierarchy, adds further critical insights for our discussion. I will focus first on the work of the Dalit anti-caste activist and political scientist, Gopal Guru (see 2002 , 2005 , 2011 ). In particular, I want to touch on a collection of essays he wrote with the philosopher of science, Sundar Sarukkai, as a conversation on the ethics of researching and theorizing Dalit experience and published as The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 ). The term, “Dalit,” itself, was popularized by Bhimraco Ramji Ambedkar (known as “Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar”). Ambedkar wrote an influential essay, The Annihilation of Caste ( 1936 /2016), played a key role in the drafting of the Constitution of India, and used this term, “Dalit,” to name those human beings which the caste system in Hinduism considered sub-human and thus, literally, “untouchable.” A significant part of independent India’s history has been a story of welfare work and the tussle between reformers and caste conservatives over what power should be allowed to the country’s “debased” and “backward” classes, of whom Dalits form a sizeable part (around 220 million in India today) (Census of India 2011 ; UN 2019 ).

To the many Indian observers, it seems clear that Dalit communities lack basic education and that, in the context of welfare work and political advancement, they do not possess the skills to diagnose—through research, writing, engagement—what their own community lacks or needs. Yet who can say what Dalits should know, or, in other words, what knowledge they should acquire? Who can declare what is best for Dalits as individuals or as a community? It is in this context that Guru connects with Gadamer. It is the perceived ability to see what others cannot see of their own experience or the possibilities before them that, at once, brings the welfare relationship into being and defines its hierarchical, dominating character. Reminding us that relationships of domination run not only North–South, Guru rejects arguments of India’s Brahmanical, top of the “twice-born” castes that “they need to intervene in the Dalit situation” because their capacity to capture and represent the truth of the Dalit’s position will advance Dalit lives (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 : 25). Echoing Gadamer, Guru responds that doing so “involves a charity element which by definition is condescending,” for it “constitutes a jajmani relationship, structurally involving a patron and a client” (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 : 25). Let us think about this for a moment in the context of Northern claims to really know what Drake ( 2018 : 12) refers to as “the ‘truth about prisons’.” Here, the presumption is that if represented accurately—which is to say, if seen with the epistemic power of our critical Northern vision—the scales will fall from Southerners’ eyes. The “undeniable truth” of the prison will be revealed. Southerners will, at last, see that its operation, and thus, very existence is, by definition, “exceptional, unconstitutional and a continuing fiasco” (Drake 2018 : 12).

The solution for Guru is that Dalits must come to knowledge and insight on their own terms, not through welfare work, “epistemological empowerment” or “epistemological charity” (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 : 25) of Brahmanical patrons seeking to diagnose their needs or inform them of their better futures. Dalits should, Guru argues, “become the subject of their own thinking rather than becoming the object of somebody else’s thinking” (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 : 23). For not only is the well-meaning judgment of those who see or understand better than the Dalit himself or herself a usurpation, it also “creates legitimacy for the patron’s existence in both the Dalit soul and Dalit society” (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 : 26). Guru then elaborates on what he sees as the ethical violations inherent in the dialectic of welfare and charity work, but we need not dwell on them here.

We should, instead, turn to the response of his interlocutor, Sundar Sarukkai. In The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory ( 2012 ), Sarukkai observes that, at first blush, Guru appears to be invoking some kind of property title claim upon Dalit life and lived experience. It might seem, he says, that Guru, like many others in our contemporary times, is looking to “lived” experience as providing some moral right to arbitrate what can or cannot be said about his community—about Dalits—by outsiders. In our penal case study terms, it might be the equivalent of saying that only a Southern state knows what is good for its penal system and may declare as much. In an observation that provides further insight into the deeply ethical nature of Guru’s argument, however, Sarukkai insists that such first blush observations are, in fact, wrong. Rather than making a claim to “copyright or patent” (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 : 29), and rather than being “interested in whether the writing of the non-Dalits is complementary or derogatory about Dalits,” Guru is, in fact, taking a position that is “ethical and normative”: “non-Dalits have no moral right to theorize about Dalits” (Guru and Sarukkai 2012 : 33; on “Dalit truth,” see Roy 2020 ).

If we remove these arguments from their specifically Indian context, we see that they offer critical insights for our thinking about penal reform, penal exports, and Global North–Global South dialogues, more generally. It is that the ethical quality of our conduct—in this case, the flagging of dangers and the warnings made about prisons—is not determined, not conditioned, by the quality of what we have to say. That is, it matters not whether we have concluded “good” or “bad” things about the prison. To claim that theory formed on the anvil of Northern experience, and perhaps even reinforced by “tests” of “fit” in the odd far flung place, reveals a general truth that Southerners should apply to themselves and their world establishes a relationship of domination (Gadamer) or charity (Guru) simply by dint of its character. This leaves liberal progressivism facing something of a dilemma: robbed of the authority to engage and instruct on the basis of being right—of holding the truth—how might this knowledge travel? How might Global North-Global South dialogue develop? Does Guru’s edict debar one person from offering any advice or insight to another? And how is one expected to behave as a moral actor if one cannot offer the important news of one’s own experience, such as that prison does not work, when another is contemplating the matter of prisons? To answer that, we might return to Gadamer, but that return will be further strengthened by one additional detour into the thought of South Asian writers on experience and theory and the long shadow cast by the Global North.

Northern Experience and the Artifice of Theory

According to Banerjee and colleagues ( 2016 : 46), the problem for Southerners thinking about themselves and their worlds “is not just that we think with concepts that carry the mark of histories not our own.” It is equally and perhaps even more importantly “that these concepts do not wear the marks of their own historicity directly. Rather, they operate in the form of an erased historicity” (Banerjee et al. 2016 : 46). Thus, what the Northern scholar approaches as an abstract concept or abstracted knowledge as theoretical proposition—such as the truth about prisons—typically is neither wholly abstracted nor entirely theoretical, if the distinction between theory and experience is to have any meaning. For those raised within Northern epistemic traditions, much of this is invisible. What Banerjee and her colleagues do (in fact, as just one movement within a much wider reappraisal of “the work of theory” ( 2016 : 42)) is to draw to our attention the “unmediated slippage” that occurs between Northern experiences of the world and global constructs or concepts. “It is for this reason,” they write, “that aspects of European history continue to function as philosophical/theoretical archetypes rather than as what it is, namely, empirical history” (Banerjee et al. 2016 : 46). In an illustration of how this unique configuration of experience/theory works—and one, moreover, that has clear implications for our thinking about “the truth” of penal forms and their inevitable impacts—they point to a well-known set of events that unfolded in England during the eighteenth century. Here, they invite us to notice “[the] way that a specific chapter of English history, ‘enclosure of the commons’, comes to be endlessly retailed as ‘primitive accumulation’—at once theoretical norm and historical necessity, undergirding the universal history of capital” (Banerjee et al. 2016 : 46).

“Theoretical norm and historical necessity.” I struggle to think of a more apt description of the way critical, well-meaning criminologists “retail” the truth of the prison and the futures that await all those who fall for its symbolic seductions. Northern empirical history reconfigured as universal history; experience as theory. And as Sarukkai reminds us, conclusions such as this do not rest on the content of what is so “retailed.” We are not, here, in a debate about authenticity; we are speaking of “norm and form,” to borrow from Paul Rabinow ( 1995 ). Like Guru, Banerjee and her colleagues also have a solution. It is more inclusive than Guru’s, and it will bring us back around to where we left Gadamer.

Banerjee and colleagues ( 2016 : 46) propose that, whereas epistemologies grounded in the European Enlightenment tradition erase historicity and, in so doing, “institute both exclusivity and universality at the same time,” new theoretical insights—insights, that is, not circumscribed by the limits of Northern experience or the conceptual tools that abstract it only weakly—will be generated at points “where stakes are reconstituted and new possibilities opened.” The mistake of the thought traditions most of us as criminologists work within is thus to imagine that our theoretical claims about phenomena that exist everywhere are strengthened by “test for fit” approaches that seek confirmation of Northern theoretical models (read, weakly abstracted Northern experience) in any conveniently to hand site in the Global South (take an African or South Asian postcolonial prison, for example). For Banerjee and colleagues, this is to misapprehend what theory and thought require in a global milieu. Thought or knowledge, they argue, “becomes ‘theoretical’ [only] when it liberates itself from its origins and opens itself out to strange places and times” (Banerjee et al. 2016 : 50). Theory, in other words, is never actually theoretical until it transcends a singular context, such as societies of the North—meaning that whatever we think we know about the “truth of the prison,” we must recognize it is neither normative nor signalling historical necessity but merely local, situated and inevitably insufficient. It is an ingredient that will contribute to new possibilities in a yet to be founded open dialogue. That would require a degree of humility not often apparent in progressive criminologies. These tend to be, as we have seen, surprising unreflexive in declamations about the truth of prisons or, indeed, many other features of our criminal justice landscapes. But the openness that humility requires is precisely what Gadamer was concerned with and so it is to him we should now return.

Towards a Norm of Ethical Engagement and an Epistemology of Dialogue

Drawing together the work of South Asian scholars with Gadamer’s diorama of human relations reinforces the scale of the ethical stakes at play and embeds such relations in a wider postcolonial epistemology. Such an epistemology requires new ways of thinking about the possibilities of knowledge and the foundations of truth. Here, we find a confluence in thinking among a variety of southernizing and postcolonial scholars. For Raewyn Connell ( 2007 : 214), for example, classical social science must give way to “a new formation of knowledge”—a body of understanding that cannot be achieved simply “by heaping description on description.” Instead, Connell ( 2007 : 223) suggests, we must accept that “the only possible future for social science on a world scale involves a principle of unification” of knowledge. Dipesh Chakrabarty ( 2000 ) offers one method of doing so, the echoes of which we can now recognize. Aiming to “create plural normative horizons specific to our existence and relevant to the examination of our lives and their possibilities,” Chakrabarty seeks to de-center or “provincialize” Europe. “The point of this,” he argues, “is not to reject social science categories but to release into the space occupied by particular European histories sedimented in them other normative and theoretical thought enshrined in other existing life practices and archives” (Chakrabarty 2000 : 20).

Yet, for all these scholars, the development of such an epistemology remains primarily a political project. For Banerjee and her colleagues ( 2016 : 49), it can be understood as “a project of transforming the contemporary”—of “renewing and reconstituting thought”—something, they argue, that “is not a neutral but a politically charged task.” Such “contemporanising,” as they refer to it, may be achieved only via methods that bring together disparate thought traditions, ways of experiencing life and of being in the world.

It is here that we may return to Gadamer, who will allow us to understand how such “a political act finer than any other of its kind” (Banerjee et al. 2016 : 49) also represents the kind of deeply ethical attitude towards truth and practice demanded in Kant’s deceptively simple formulation of his categorical imperative. The unifying, pluralizing and integrative practices these scholars propose is what Gadamer ( 1960 /2013: 317) would refer to as a “fusion of horizons.” Such horizons, for Gadamer, emerge out of the historically—and, we may add, culturally—conditioned situation in which we each find ourselves. Both the point and the difficulty of situations, he observes, are the very fact of our being in them. Being unable to be outside them, we obviously struggle to have objective knowledge of them. We find ourselves positioned—having a certain standpoint that limits our view and thus the breadth of our vision. The horizon of which he speaks, then, is “the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point” (Gadamer: 1960 /2013: 313). It is, of course, understandable that, taking in all we can see and comprehend from our vantage point in the Global North, we might believe ourselves to have found the truth—such as the truth about prisons. But for many looking south, the error, in this respect, is to have aligned with method at precisely the moment when an ethical demand is faced. For in looking across cultures, histories, ontologies and the sometimes “messy categories and meandering epistemologies” (White 2000 : 5) with which those other than ourselves appear to make sense of their lives, our ascription to methodological objectivity works only to mask our situatedness. And it is this very situatedness that limits our capacity to apprehend and comprehend lives and worlds that are not ours—that are beyond our range of vision. Reflecting on the product of such “objectivity,” Gadamer ( 1960 /2013: 311) observes that “[i]n our understanding, which we imagine is so innocent because its results seem so self-evident, the other presents itself so much in terms of our own selves that there is no longer a question of self and other.”

Thus, in our belief in having found the objective truth about prisons, the Global South loses its otherness to become but one more reflection of our own selves—of the Global North—albeit with a few things yet to learn. Our reason becomes right reason (truth seeing)—something available to the other who is imagined almost as a shadow of ourselves, delayed but ready to step forward into that place from where we stand and view the world. The self-evident truth of the prison—or whichever other progressive, well-meaning insight we bring forth to Southern people and places—thus misapprehends a moment demanding ethical connection and, instead, sees in it only an opportunity for instruction and truth-telling. The fundamental ethical challenge is thus to resist the desire—driven by method, natural in its seeming self-evidence—to subjugate another to our own horizons. The path to truth of any kind begins at the moment we open ourselves to the truth that another may impart—a truth that goes beyond the possibilities offered by our own vision, our own horizon. This marks a receptivity not only to the other but so, too, to the possibility that we, ourselves, might become somebody different by dint of this interaction.

This, says Gadamer, is what openness represents: it is to “experience the Thou truly as a Thou—i.e. not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us” ( 1960 /2013: 369). To do otherwise is to decline what he terms “the mutuality of such a relation” and, in doing so, one “changes this relationship and destroys its moral bond” ( 1960 /2013: 369). The dialogue that ensues thus has a profoundly ethical attitude because each is open to the truth claims of another that might arise within it. In this way, Gadamer ( 1960 /2013: 317) explains, “ understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves ” (emphasis in original) but ultimately combining to form a new shared horizon of understanding. As a matter of method, therefore, openness and dialogical engagement between “I and Thou” proceed not through providing answers—telling what is known, one’s own truths—but, instead, consists in the art of questioning. Here, Gadamer speaks of the objects of our knowledge—think once again of the prison—being “broken open by the question”: “The significance of questioning” in dialogue, Gadamer ( 1960 /2013: 371) maintains, “consists in revealing the questionability of what is questioned.” What, we might begin by asking, can be a prison?

Dialogue, therefore, appears in this formulation not as a metaphor for something else but as a method for reconciling the problem of different experiences, world views, and horizons of knowledge. Guy Widdershoven and Suzanne Metselaar ( 2012 : 295) describe hermeneutics as “the theory of understanding through dialogue.” The point, here, is not to become rigidly shackled to a hermeneutic method but to draw upon its guidance. Especially important in this respect is the ethical position of openness and its counterpart method of dialogic questioning. The primacy of the question within such dialogue flattens hierarchies. It shifts each participant’s attention from telling what is known to contemplating what is not, as the horizons of another create a space for understanding that exceeds one’s own world view.

Such a method—a dialogue established through practices of questioning, not telling—does not, in any way, undermine the Kantian primacy of human dignity, for it does not proscribe telling what one knows. It does not demand a withholding of the truths emerging from one’s own situatedness. Rather, it embeds the process of their emergence in a discourse founded on reciprocity and engagement with the other’s very difference and the differentness of the context or world within which our knowledge will need to find its relevance. With respect to penal reform, then, one would not begin with an answer—encapsulating “the truth about prisons”—but with a question that would allow the discourse on prisons or confinement more broadly to move, iteratively, somewhere new. Under the lights of what Banerjee and her colleagues ( 2016 : 49) call “contemporanising,” this would “involve critically engaging [other] thought, its concepts and categories, in a dialogue across times and places such that it produces new insights and new concepts that help us deal with new challenges of the present.”

While the primacy of the question is constantly renewed by the openness of its possible answers—of what is not settled and what is thus indeterminate—the power of dialogue lies in the meeting of horizons. For as Gadamer observes, questions, themselves, are not infinitely open. They are, in fact, bounded by the horizon of the questioner and it is only through the dialogue, itself, that each party becomes aware of a space that combines old and new awareness and from which a next, entirely new, question might be drawn.

I have experienced this in my own work in several ways. I will mention one briefly by way of closing, lest this method be felt to be too arch or highly theoretical for the world of everyday criminology. In this case, my dialogic partners are Buddhist or scholars of Buddhism and questions about closed penal spaces are, in many ways, inseparable from the reverential position accorded closed monastic spaces in a society deeply steeped in Buddhist ways of thinking and being. These, of course, penetrate every form of life, thought and practice, and so to ask questions about the meaning of enclosure or confinement, its generative possibilities, how prison regimes or their alternatives might be shaped by faith and culture, and how offenders might best return to the milieu of community are but the first moves in a dialogue that takes in notions of aspirations, futures, reform and values. Thus, for example, one entry point to thinking about penal reform is better understanding the history and religious and cultural coding of forms of separation from society. While we have discussed here an institutional model—the prison—Himalayan Buddhism recognizes a deep history of banishment, retreat and labouring in practices of atonement for wrongs both social and spiritual. Milarepa, an eleventh-century Tibetan spiritual master, for example, atoned for his malicious use of shamanist powers through labour and, in so doing, restored his dharma. Until as recently as the 1970s, analogous forms of banishment or exile were practiced at the village level. Different interlocutors have reported different accounts of this. Unfortunately, as an element of customary justice, little formal trace of its village-level character and administration remains. Yet, at the same time, and even if only in a general way, a sense of what was once possible, that was once found at the intersection of faith, custom and penality, pervades reflections on the place of the prison there today. In such contexts, discourses on confinement are capable of operating on different levels. One revolves around the globalized prison model, along with suggestions for reform. Yet other discourses on punishment exist, too. They are less visible and, as an outsider, I became aware of their existence only gradually. They are not secret, but one does have to begin asking the right questions, by finding a grammar to open, or enter, a discourse shaped by horizons that are distinctly not my own. In doing so, I have begun to think far more expansively and creatively about what penal reform might entail and the places it might be possible to go. I know a lot about Northern prisons, but here, in these discussions, I forget about telling. Here, I am full of questions. My emerging conceptual or intellectual horizon for what might count as penal in this place, what resources might be brought to bear—often deep resources of cultural and religious meaning—offers a radically refigured vision of the possibilities of belonging, censure, and reintegration.

What resources lie in these traditions, powerful cultural codes, and grassroots memories of quite different penal forms? The end points of these discussions are not known, which is precisely where their power lies. But in imagining what is possible, I am drawn back to Banerjee and colleagues’ observations on the syncretic dialogues of the Dalit reformer, Ambedkar, who straddled world views as disparate as modern constitutional legalism and ancient Buddhist tradition. Banerjee and colleagues ( 2016 : 49) observe that in bringing:

Buddhist tradition to bear upon a deeply conflicted and unequal present, Ambedkar sought to make possible a future [for Dalits] that was impossible to realise only through reason of state or social mobilisation. It was a future that had to be philosophically accomplished first. Ambedkar sought to philosophically arrive at a future—a future that the present could not engender from out of its own logic—by staging a complex encounter between the modern and the non-modern and between tradition and counter-tradition in his thought.

It is, in this way, that we might hope to find in dialogues on things like the meanings of penal confinement or redemptive pathways to reintegration in a Buddhist context, the seeds of Ambedkar’s “future that the present could not engender from its own logic.”

What sort of ethical and methodological issues arise in southern criminology? What are the implications for knowledge production and for practice—for truth and method—as Northern or North-oriented criminologists look or to the Global South or, indeed, as criminologists of the Global South seek to negotiate long-standing structural inequalities and hierarchies of power within societies of the Global South? An adequate answer to these questions might occupy this nascent endeavor for some years to come. Here, I have attempted to lay a groundwork, to suggest how criminologists of both the Global North and the Global South might understand and anticipate the ethical demands that flow from interactions that traverse boundaries of power, knowledge, location, history, culture and the like. I have tried to step through these ethical challenges and their attendant methodological implications. Like Tariq Jazeel and Colin McFarlane ( 2010 : 110, 121), who contemplated the “postcolonial politics of knowledge production,” my aim has not been to offer up a “catch-all universal formula,” but to stimulate more focussed discussion on the place and meaning of ethical conduct in criminology.

In pursuit of this, a first purpose of the article has been to illustrate my case via a fairly straightforward and non-exoticized, anodyne even, area of criminological work of interest to both the Global North and Global South. Here, I have used an example—the question of penal reform in countries of the Global South—that takes up a matter that within progressive criminological circles is regarded as uncontroversially a closed case: prisons are inherently and deeply problematic and efforts at reform typically further embed precisely that from which we wish to free ourselves. There is a small but important literature dating back to the 1980s on the export of such reforms to what was then known as the “Third World” and now the “Global South.” For convenience, I have drawn on Drake’s ( 2018 ) excellent summary of prisons’ ills and the dangers of their export via reform programming under the guise of state building as a foil for thinking through a counter-case grounded in an ethics of dialogue. To jump ahead of myself a little, here, I should add that consistent with the work of South Asian writers on the ethics of research and theory in this article, I can make such a counter-argument without at all disputing the research on which Drake’s argument rests. Thus, an important aim of this contemplation of ethics and method has been to find a way of looking at the kinds of human relationships encountered in southern criminological work that goes beyond ad-hoc judgments about what is “good” or “bad” and looks, instead, to such relationships in their broadest human context.

This is important to me on a personal level, as well as purely academic one, for I have been working through questions of penal reform with colleagues in different parts of the Global South for some time. It is that personal experience with Global North-Global South engagement that establishes a second purpose of this article, which is to think through an ethics of practice for criminologists. What is at stake when we venture to the Global South or when Southerners face each other across boundaries that might be equally as sharp? How might the ethical dimensions of our conduct exceed the boundaries of what is captured in the human research ethics forms and declarations favored by Northern universities? This article has attempted to work through such considerations but with a focus on something that frequently eludes the self-consciousness and reflexivity of progressive criminologists, which is the political and ethical implications of well-meaning judgment and the fine line that separates “doing good” from practices of domination. At its broadest political level, this can be understood within frameworks of imperialism, decolonization experiences, contemporary continuities with the past, and neocolonial or neo-imperial instincts and practices. Ethically, I have attempted to illustrate what is at stake by placing the work of the German hermeneuticist Hans-Georg Gadamer in conversation with that of South Asian scholars including Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai, Prathama Banerjee, Aditya Nigam and Rakesh Pandey. For these latter writers, social science research and the uses and creation of knowledge are, inextricably and at once, ethical and political acts. Bringing them together with Gadamer, I suggest a formulation that I described above as norm of ethical engagement —that is, a set of prescriptions about what ethical engagement demands—and an epistemology of dialogue , describing the conditions under which knowledge may emerge and a method through which north and south may meet and speak as equals.

Some philosophers draw a distinction between I-Thou relations, that tend to be positive, and I-It relations, that are negative—that regard another not as a person but as an object—an “it.” Gadamer, in fact, did not make this distinction and for that reason, the discussion in this article will follow Gadamer’s formulation. For those wishing to explore this distinction in depth, see Buber ( 1970 ) and, rather tangentially but in the context of criminology, see Liebling ( 2015 ).

Gadamer develops his arguments that apply to everyone using the gendered male form. Despite this being odious to the contemporary reader, I have retained it as written and do not append “[sic]” as a notation, which is distracting and, in its constant repetition, trite. Gadamer’s writing is an historical text and I well recognize the gendered expression it contains.

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Acknowledgments

This article emerged from a paper I delivered at the International Congress on Southern Criminology in Bogotá, Colombia, November 6–8, 2019. I thank the organizers of that conference and the editors of this special issue for their feedback and encouragement and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their engagement with the paper and its arguments. At the University of Sheffield, thanks go to Arushi Garg and Adam White for their inciteful comments and feedback on an early draft of the paper. I am thankful to Richard Whitecross at Edinburgh Napier University for a short lesson on some finer points of Buddhist history. I also thank my colleagues and interlocutors in South Asia who have given freely of their time and knowledge to engage me in dialogues that I hope have only just begun. As ever, errors or omissions are solely my own. Travel and fieldwork in South Asia were supported by a Global Challenges Research Fund grant administered by the University of Sheffield.

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Brown, M. Truth and Method in Southern Criminology. Crit Crim 29 , 451–467 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-021-09588-8

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Repudiating the Criminology Licensure Examination: A Regional Case Study

• Reynold Jay J. Bahunsua
• Gerick O. Salig
• Jonathan M. Saile
• Lemuel Brian C. Gallo
• Teopisto Y. Culanag Jr
• Jose F. Cuevas Jr
• Jul 20, 2023

Reynold Jay J. Bahunsua, Gerick O. Salig, Jonathan M. Saile, Lemuel Brian C. Gallo, Teopisto Y. Culanag Jr, Jose F. Cuevas Jr *College of Criminology, Misamis University, Philippines

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2023.7738

Received: 17 May 2023; Revised: 18 June 2023; Accepted: 23 June 2023; Published: 20 July 2023

The study aimed to explore the reasons and experiences of criminology graduates who decided not to take the criminology licensure examination in Misamis Occidental. The study utilized a regional case study approach, and data were collected through in-depth interviews with twelve participants who met the inclusion criteria. Due to the time-related restrictions of this study, it is imperative to note that the information provided is based on the scenario up until the time when the devastating effects of COVID-19 were lessened as it was one of the factors which led to the repudiation of the board exam. Given that circumstances, rules, and attitudes may change over time, it is essential to consider recent developments in the subject of criminology licensure as well as new information, changes in policy, and any subsequent developments. The main problematique impact for the profession and its practitioners is the primary concern with regard to the rejection of the criminology licensure examination. The licensure examination is a vital tool for determining whether aspirant criminologists have the knowledge, abilities, and competencies required to work in the discipline. The legitimacy and trustworthiness of the evaluation process, as well as the ramifications for public safety, professional standards, and ethical issues, are all called into question by rejecting the examination. Findings revealed that the participants’ decision not to take the criminology licensure examination was influenced by various factors, such as lack of self-confidence, financial stability issues, unexpected parenthood concerns, and unforeseen world health crisis. Additionally, the study highlighted the current system’s negative consequences that force graduates to take the licensure examination, such as the loss of opportunities to pursue other careers, discrimination, and stigma. Overall, this study suggests the need for a more flexible and inclusive system that provides opportunities for criminology graduates to pursue careers that match their interests and skills. This study also highlights the importance of understanding criminology graduates’ diverse experiences and perspectives and the need for further research on the topic

Keywords: criminology graduates, criminology licensure examination, financial stability parenthood concerns, repudiating, self-confidence, world health crisis.

INTRODUCTION

• There are numerous challenges and concerns associated with taking the board exam. Fear, issues, and concerns impede students from taking the Criminology Licensure Exam (Nawani, 2021; Duong et al., 2018). Therefore, the graduates can self-study and choose their preferred Review Center to refresh and enhance their knowledge and skills obtained in the formal school setting in preparation for the licensure examination (Lopez, 2019). However, during this period of six months, their fears, issues, and concerns started to arise and affect their decision to take the board exam because of doubts and mixed This results in the students having a negative perspective toward taking the board exam because of the fear of failing the said examination (Brahmi & Touil, 2022). According to Manalo and Obligar (2013), the decline in the percentage of Filipino graduates passing the various licensure exams is a sign of the Philippines’ higher education system’s declining quality, which can be characterized by the variety and level of faculty competency.
• A board exam serves as documentation of one’s assessment of academic standards. According to the PRC, passing a board exam entitles one to the status of a respected professional who possesses moral convictions, a strong sense of self, and a competitive edge on the global One must pass the board exams to be granted a license to practice a certain profession. The authority in charge of administering, carrying out, and upholding regulations about licensing various professions in the Philippines is known as the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC). Out of 161,527 examinees who took the criminologists board examinations in 2018, 2019, and 2021, the Philippines produced 60,430 licensed criminologists, with an average national passing rate of 36.95 percent (Professional Regulation Commission, 2018a; Professional Regulation Commission, 2018b; Professional Regulation Commission, 2019a; Professional Regulation Commission, 2019b; Professional Regulation Commission, 2021)., (Espartero, 2021). The study will determine the causes of fears, issues, and concerns of graduates who repudiate the licensure examination. The presence of students’ fears, issues, and concerns is a determining factor in their success in taking the Criminology Licensure Examination (Cox, 2011). They are interconnected with each other, and it is unavoidable. Fear, such as failure to pass the examination, CLE requirement issues, and financial concerns, all equate to changing the behavior of the board taker. Graduates must overcome these challenges in life to be prepared for the upcoming examination and decrease the chances of failure.

Republic Act No. 11131, also known as “The Philippine Criminology Profession Act of 2018,” mandates that anyone wishing to practice criminology must pass the Criminologists Licensure Examinations administered by the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC), Professional Regulatory Board of Criminology (CLE). The Professional Regulatory Board for Criminologists will be managed by the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC), which will have administrative oversight and control over it. It will have a chairperson as a leader and four members who have been chosen by the president. (Asuncion, 2019; Cuiye & Junlin, 2021). The Criminology Licensure Examination has six (6) subjects which include Criminal Jurisprudence and Procedure (20%), Law Enforcement Administration (20%), Ethics and Human Relations (10%), Criminalistics (20%), Correctional Administration (15%), and Criminal Sociology (15%). In addition, before the examination, the student must acquire a Notice of Admission (NOA) with the following requirements; 1.) Original and Photocopy of Transcript of Records (TOR) from your school, 2.) Original and Photocopies of Authenticated Birth Certificate (NSO)/ PSA Marriage Contract for female applicants, 3.) Receipt of Examination Fee, 4.) Cedula (Photocopy), 5.) PRC Number.

The researchers conducted this study to look at a factor that discourages a lot of recent graduates from taking the licensing exam in Misamis Occidental during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal was to pinpoint a particular cause or element that affects their reluctance. By comprehending this element, the researchers hope to offer perceptions and suggestions that can solve the problem and aid recent graduates in their licensure exam preparations despite the difficulties the pandemic poses.

This study’s contribution will help determine the fears, issues, and concerns of the graduates in Criminology for repudiating the Criminology Licensure Examination (D’Souza, 2022). We can also identify the graduates who are not taking the exams and their life after graduation. Regarding the factors that influence the problems encountered when taking the CLE, which is the study’s main focus, The academic leaders, faculty, criminology students, and criminology graduates who will take the Criminology Licensure Examination of Higher Education Institutions in the Philippines are predicted to find this study to be useful (Espartero, 2021). Additionally, administrators will receive assistance in creating procedures to improve the school’s performance on the licensing test. It might also be the best way for curriculum designers, educators, school administrators, teachers, and recent criminology graduates to advance the field’s professional standing and the nation’s criminology profession (Jonson & Pratt, 2022).

Moreover, it helps the community, the criminology graduates, determine the possible problems they will encounter upon taking the licensure examination. In addition, this study can be a future reference for the educator, guiding them in partaking toward criminology graduates (Cascayan et al., 2021). Finally, the result of this study will encourage future criminology graduates to overcome their fears, issues, and concerns.

This research utilized the case study research design. A case study is an empirical investigation into a case or cases by answering “how” or “why” questions about the phenomenon of interest (Alam, 2020). It is a process of in-depth inquiry of a specific person, institution, community, or any group viewed as a unit that includes developing, adjusting, remedial, or correcting procedures that appropriately follow a diagnosis of the reasons for maladjustment or of positive behaviors. This method is appropriate for determining the fears, issue, and concerns of Criminology graduates who repudiates taking the Licensure Examination.

             The study administered the entire Misamis Occidental, where the criminology graduates reside, where most of the participants reside in Ozamiz City. Misamis Occidental comprises 3 cities; Ozamiz City, Oroquieta City, and Tangub City, and the adjacent province of Misamis Occidental which is Lanao Del Norte. Northern Mindanao has a lot total of 2,049,602 hectares (5,064,680 acres) of land compose Northern Mindanao. More than 60% of this territory is designated as forest land. There are plenty of fish and other marine items in its oceans. The location has a pleasant, mild, and energizing climate thanks to the lush greenery, natural springs, and high elevation

Participants

The sample number of this study consists of twelve (12) participants who are Bachelor of Science in Criminology graduates. They were identified through the list of graduates with a Bachelor of Science in Criminology currently residing in Misamis Occidental. The sex of the participants was mentioned as it was related to one of the factors in the repudiation of the examination which was the unexpected parenthood concerns. The researchers chose the snowball sampling technique because it is frequently used when researching populations that are challenging to locate or reach using conventional sample techniques. The use of snowball sampling allowed the researchers to access these communities by way of recommendations from already-established social networks. It focuses on getting an in-depth understanding of a specific group’s experiences, viewpoints, or actions. The approach made it possible for researchers to establish rapport and trust with participants through recommendations, which can promote open and honest conversations. The participants were chosen based on the following criteria: 1.) A Bachelor of Science in Criminology graduate, 2.) Recent criminology graduate who repudiated the first Licensure Examination 3.) Willing to participate in the study.

Instruments

The researchers developed an interview that serves as a tool for gathering participant data. The participants are graduates of the Bachelor of Science in Criminology. Furthermore, they were asked about the main question concerning the repudiation of taking the Criminologist Licensure Examination and also the challenges experienced after graduation. The interview questions were determined based on their possible issues and concerns, experiences, and factors that might affect their decisions which can ultimately lead to the repudiation of the examination. The use of a recording device was also present, which recorded the response of the participants during the interview.

Data Collection 

The study was conducted by interviewing different participants. The participants were identified by their background profile, including their age, sex, address, school and year they graduated, and the expected results of the random question.

Before collecting the data, the researcher sought permission from the Dean of the College of Criminology at Misamis University. Following the approval of the letter request, the researcher requested permission from the Dean of the College of Criminology to conduct the study with the identified names of school heads and teachers in the division. The researcher then scheduled an interview with the selected individuals and presented the interview schedule. After informing them that the talk had been recorded, the researcher assured the participants that their comments would be maintained in the strictest confidence. Further, the minimum health protocol was observed during the interview, considering the pandemic.

Ethical Consideration

The researchers always adhered to the ethical norms in the ongoing study. The researchers respected the social indifferences of the participants, which the researchers guided. All participants’ voluntary involvement was adhered to by the researchers. By allowing the participants to sign the informed consent form created by the researchers, the interview was conducted with their express approval. The researchers promoted privacy and confidentiality concerning the participants’ identities by refraining from stating their identification while conducting the interview. Privacy and confidentiality were always observed, particularly the name of the participants and other information unnecessary to the study. The researchers adhered to the guidelines set by the Republic Act No. 10173, known as the “Data Privacy Act of 2012”. The researchers also followed the minimum health protocols provided by the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) and the Department of Health (DOH).

Data Analysis

In this study, the data were analyzed using Yin’s 5-step data analysis approach, which also enabled researchers to examine textual data. Five steps made up Yin’s process: gathering the data, breaking it down, putting it back together, deciphering its significance, and drawing conclusions. The researchers initially gathered the data before creating the categories. In the second step, the researchers separate the data in order to identify and eradicate recurrent elements in the phenomenon being studied. After recreating the data in step three, the researchers next grouped the major themes. In step four, the researchers compared patterns to interview transcripts, reflective papers, and documents to assess the significance of the data. In step 5, the researchers came to a conclusion or organized the information into a separate structural description. Conclusions were drawn based on the major themes that appeared in the survey participants’ diverse responses.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

3.1 Participant’s Profile

The participant’s profile was collected based on their age, sex, provincial address, year graduated, and the school graduated from.

The data below shows the profile of the twelve participants given with their respective code names.

The study formulated four (4) themes based on the responses of the participants during the conduct of an interview with the researcher.

3.2 Lack of Self-Confidence

Lack of self-confidence was identified as one of the issues among the graduates in repudiating the Criminology Licensure Examination. It was a barrier for the graduates to achieve their goals, especially passing the licensure examination. Some graduates may doubt their abilities or feel intimidated by the exam, leading to anxiety and difficulty performing to the best of their abilities. However, it is important to note that other factors may also be at play, such as inadequate preparation, lack of study time, or difficulty with certain subject areas.

“I am practical to myself because if I take the exam, I am not sure if I can pass the board exam, and it will be a waste of time and also the money I spent.” (P2, 28-30)

“I am struggling with myself; I think I cannot do it.” (P6, 77)

Based on the participants’ responses, it is evident that their confidence is very low, resulting in the licensure examination’s repudiation. Therefore, it is important for individuals struggling with the licensure examination to identify the areas in which they need improvement and develop a targeted study plan to address those weaknesses. In addition to improving their knowledge and skills, individuals may also benefit from strategies to boost their self-confidence, such as positive self-talk, visualization techniques, and seeking support from friends, family, or a professional counselor (Singh & Patidar, 2018). Building confidence is a gradual process, but individuals can learn to overcome self-doubt and achieve their goals with practice and persistence.

In conclusion, this study determined that the lack of self-confidence plays a big factor in graduates’ repudiation of the Criminology Licensure Examination. It can create barriers to success and personal development, limiting opportunities and causing feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. However, overcoming this lack of confidence can help graduates pursue their goals and succeed in their chosen careers.

3.3 Financial Stability Issues

Financial stability issues are one of the factors in repudiating the criminology licensure examination for graduates of criminology. Many criminology graduates are not yet taking the licensure examination because of financial stability issues. It is one of the reasons why they tend to repudiate taking the board exam because some of them need help in terms of financial capability to undergo the said examination. Other graduates tend to look for a job first to earn and have savings to afford any review center to prepare for the board exam.

Filipino students are severely financially burdened by the cost of attending a review center, to start. The cost of joining a review facility ranges on average from 9,000 to 12,000 pesos. This sum may be burdensome for families that are struggling financially. Although many students find it challenging to get additional educational support and resources, the high cost of review center membership acts as a barrier for many of them. Since their main priority is education, the majority of these students lack employment, which makes it even more difficult for them to pay the costs of review center membership. Unemployed students who want to pay for their education and the costs associated with review centers must find other sources of income as they don’t receive a salary. Additionally, the average tuition cost in the Philippines for students taking a criminology course is around 30.000 pesos. The financial burden on students and their families is further increased by this hefty sum.

“Financial problem.” (P8, 106-107)

“The issue that made me repudiate the exam that year is that I am struggling financially and I have a problem at that time.” (P9, 117-119) “I was experiencing financial problems” (P11, 151-152)

“I looked for a job the day after I graduated so that I can earn and save money for the     preparation to take the board exam.” (P8, 107-109)

“I looked for a job because I was financially broke and it is impossible for me to afford a review center in that situation.” (P11, 158-159)

“My decision after graduation is that we lack finances and that’s why I also relaxed at that time because I also support my younger sibling in his study.” (P9, 120-122)

Based on the participants’ responses, it is clear that their financial situation affected their decision to repudiate the criminology licensure examination. Financial stability can certainly be a factor that affects a graduate’s ability to take and pass the criminology licensure examination (Stogner, 2022). The cost of studying and preparing for the exam and the expenses related to taking the exam can be significant, and some graduates may need help to afford these costs. In addition, graduates struggling with income may have to balance the demands of studying for the exam with the need to work and earn an income, making it difficult to devote enough time and energy to their studies.

In conclusion, this study determined the impact of financial stability issues concerning the repudiation of the Criminology Licensure Examination. Financial stability, or the lack thereof, can significantly affect an individual’s decision to take the licensure exam. The inability to pay for review classes or exam fees, financial dependence on family, or inability to find a job to support oneself may hinder an individual from pursuing their career goals in criminology. It may lead to the repudiation of the licensure exam and limit opportunities for career advancement.

Therefore, addressing financial stability issues in pursuing a career in criminology or any other field is important. Seeking financial assistance or exploring alternative options such as scholarships or grants may help overcome financial barriers.

3.4 Unexpected Parenthood Concerns

Another reason behind repudiating the criminology licensure examination in graduates is the unexpected parenthood concerns. Being a student, criminology graduate, and parent can be more complicated than we imagine. Those who have not personally faced that kind of concern will not understand the difficulty of this situation. It is difficult for criminology graduates to have divided priorities between studies and parental responsibility. It should be separated to ensure full functionality in preparing for the licensure examination. When you are a parent and student, family will always prevail if you choose, which will result in repudiating the licensure examination for some criminology graduates. If you have parenthood concerns, you must set aside your wants and needs in life and put them to your offspring.

“I have just recently given birth to my child and had to take care of the child as a breastfeeding mother.” (P11, 152-153)

“The second reason is that my partner also gave birth.” (P7, 89-90)

Based on the participants’ responses during the interview, another reason behind the repudiation of the licensure examination is the unexpected parenthood concerns. It can significantly affect a graduate’s ability to prepare for and take the criminology licensure examination. The responsibilities of parenthood, such as caring for a child, can be demanding and time-consuming. As a result, it may make it difficult for some graduates to find the time and energy to study and prepare for the exam (Andrewartha et al., 2022). In addition, unexpected parenthood concerns can bring financial challenges, further compounding the difficulties graduates face trying to balance their responsibilities as a parent with the demands of preparing for the licensure examination.

In conclusion, this study discovered the effects of unexpected parenthood concerns towards repudiating the Criminology Licensure Examination among graduates. It suggests that unexpected parenthood can be a significant factor that affects an individual’s ability to take the licensure exam and pursue a career in criminology. Unexpected parenthood concerns such as lack of financial support, inadequate childcare arrangements, and difficulty balancing parental responsibilities with academic or professional obligations can create significant barriers to an individual’s ability to prepare for and take the licensure exam. These concerns may lead to the exam’s repudiation and may limit career advancement opportunities.

3.5 Unforeseen World Health Crisis

The unforeseen world health crisis we experienced in the year 2019 up to this date is another factor that has caused graduates to not take the criminology licensure exams. The epidemic has had an impact on a few graduates of criminology. They did not anticipate that the unforeseen global health crisis would force them to postpone their Criminology Licensure Examination (CLE) exam. All of the recent Criminology graduates were forced to accept their situation after the President ordered that all employees of the government and the private sector would stay at home until the health problem was rectified. In the end, the graduates of the criminology program developed a growing nervousness, which caused more issues that will hinder them from taking the criminology license exam. The schedule for the board exam among the participants unfortunately coincided with the peak of the devastating effects of COVID-19 which ultimately resulted in the postponement of their exams. The pandemic, which took effect still continues to bloom and affects the application of the interviewed participant during their time.

“I wasn’t able to take the board exam because of the pandemic. We were scheduled to take the exam in December but it was moved because of the said pandemic.” (P12, 172 – 174)

“There is covid that time and it is difficult to take since the board examination keeps getting postponed.” (P7, 88-89)

Based on the response from the participants during the interview, the reason behind the repudiation of the licensure examination is because of the postponement of their exam due to an unforeseen world health crisis. The unforeseen world health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can affect an individual’s ability to prepare for and take licensure examinations (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020). In addition, the pandemic has led to widespread educational disruptions, with many schools and universities forced to transition to remote learning, which can be challenging for some students.

In addition, the pandemic has caused significant stress and anxiety for many people, making it difficult to focus on studying and preparing for exams. The pandemic has also resulted in the closure of testing centers or limited seating capacity, which may have made it difficult for some graduates to schedule their licensure examination or forced them to delay their exams.

In conclusion, this study recognized the unforeseen world health crisis as an important factor affecting graduates’ decision to repudiate the Criminology Licensure Examination. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may have created significant barriers for graduates to take the licensure exam and pursue their career goals in criminology. In addition, the world health crisis may have affected graduates, such as health concerns, financial instability, and limited access to resources such as review centers and study materials. As a result, it may have hindered their ability to prepare for and take the licensure exam, leading to the repudiation of the exam and limiting opportunities for career advancement.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on the study’s findings, the participants struggled to take the Criminology Licensure Examination because of the identified themes of the study, such as lack of self-confidence, financial stability issues, unexpected parenthood concerns, and unforeseen world health crisis, for graduates preparing for licensing tests, a lack of self-confidence can be a significant barrier because it can cause procrastination, self-doubt, and trouble paying attention to the subject matter. Graduates with low self-esteem may find it helpful to work with a counselor or coach to develop coping mechanisms for stress management, self-esteem enhancement, and exam focus. Graduates who are preparing for licensing examinations may find it challenging to pay for study materials, enroll in test preparation classes, or pay for transportation to the testing facility due to financial stability difficulties. Graduates who are struggling financially may find it beneficial to look for scholarships, grants, or other types of financial aid to help them pay for these expenses. Graduates preparing for licensing examinations may face additional difficulties due to unanticipated motherhood issues, The aims and plans for a criminology graduate’s profession can be derailed by unanticipated parental worries. It may be difficult for them to manage their time and resources, including the preparation for the license exam if they have not planned or prepared for motherhood. Their mental and emotional health as well as their capacity to concentrate on studying for the exam may be negatively impacted by this, which can cause tension and anxiety. Graduates preparing for licensure exams may face additional difficulties as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and other unanticipated global health crises. They may find it challenging to access study materials, locate testing sites that are open, or feel confident in their ability to pass the exam given the uncertainty and disruption brought on by the pandemic. Graduates who are struggling with these issues could find it helpful to look for online or remote study resources, to keep up with testing center availability and safety procedures, and to ask their peers, mentors, or professors for support. This theme was derived through the interview each participant conducted based on their own decision and experience. They cope with this problem through the help and support of their family, peers, and guidance from the almighty God to fulfill their desire to take the criminology licensure examination.

It is recommended to monitor the preparedness of the graduates towards taking the Criminology Licensure Examination and also identify the different strengths and weaknesses of graduates in their subjects for preparation and enhancement of knowledge. Furthermore, the graduates are encouraged to focus on their strengths and conquer their weaknesses, as well as areas where they have received positive feedback. Additionally, setting achievable goals and working towards them help build confidence. The graduates are also recommended to create a budget plan and prioritize spending based on their needs and values. Seeking additional income sources, such as part-time work or freelancing, can also help alleviate financial strain. Graduates who experience unexpected parenthood concerns are recommended to seek support from family, friends, or a parenting group to help navigate parenthood’s challenges.

Additionally, exploring resources such as parenting classes or therapy can help build skills and confidence in your parenting abilities. Finally, in the unforeseen world health crisis, graduates must prioritize their physical and mental health by following recommended safety guidelines and seeking support from loved ones or a mental health professional. Focusing on things within your control, such as staying informed and practicing self-care, can help alleviate uncertainty and anxiety.

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